Are our children losing manual dexterity?
One of the things that I love about this project is that nearly everyone I meet has an opinion or idea to share. This week I had an amazing conversation with one of my oldest friends. She's a visual art and design teacher at a secondary school in South Australia. She has always been passionate about sharing her skills with her students. Like me, she works from the premise that her teaching practice is not about simply teaching a technique or a process. It's about upskilling her students in a range of ways, developing their confidence and critical thinking skills, and encouraging them to create work that reflects the things they care about.
So, imagine her surprise when she discovered that a student in one of her classes could not use a pair of scissors! Not only that, but her teaching colleague had a similar experience only a few months later. These cases are limited in number (so far!), but they never occurred at all when she started teaching thirty years ago. She, like many teachers, is witnessing constant anecdotal evidence of a steady erosion of basic manual dexterity amongst her students. She further observed that she is alarmed by the lack of note taking skills amongst her students as well as a significant increase in poor handwriting. You might argue that handwriting doesn't need to be legible in the age of the computer, but if it means that students can't take accurate notes and use that process as a thinking and learning tool, then I think we are talking about a serious problem.
Children honing their practical skills (Photo by Vanessa Loring via Pexels)
I confess to being totally flabbergasted and appalled that there are young people entering high school who don't know how to use a pair of scissors. It bothers me that learning such a basic manual skill has bypassed them throughout primary education and in their home life. Perhaps being able to cut something with a pair of scissors is not a critical life skill, but it does speak to a wider problem. If you haven't learned the right way to squeeze the scissor blades together with predominantly vertical force, but also a little bit of sideways pressure, then you cut off a major practical and creative avenue. And if this lack of manual dexterity extends into other parts of your life where the only things your hands do is interact with touch screens, use ready prepared materials, and open processed food and drink packaging, then we have a generation of young people coming through to adulthood who don't have the basic skills required to manage everyday problems. What happens when life throws a curve ball (perhaps a global pandemic!) and they need to do some basic manual tasks and problem solving for themselves?
In another example of the same effect, I was recently directed towards a 2018 article from the Edge Foundation in the UK - https://www.edge.co.uk/news-and-events/news/towards-twenty-first-century-education-system-edge-future-learning/. The post quotes Roger Kneebone, Professor of Surgical Education at Imperial College, London:
"It is a concern of mine and my scientific colleagues that whereas in the past you could make the assumption that students would leave school able to do certain practical things – cutting things out, making things – that is no longer the case. We have students who have very high exam grades, but lack tactile general knowledge... An obvious example is of a surgeon needing some dexterity and skill in sewing or stitching."
The same piece quotes Tristram Hunt, Director of the V&A Museum:
"Creativity is not just for artists. Subjects like design and technology, music, art and drama are vitally important for children to develop imagination and resourcefulness, resilience, problem-solving, team-working and technical skills...These meta-skills are critical in all sectors, not just the creative industries."
A surgeon’s practical skills are just as important as their cognitive understanding of human anatomy
(Photo by Anna Shvets via Pexels)
The post links to the Edge Foundation's report "Towards a Twenty-First Century Education System" (https://www.edge.co.uk/documents/12/edge_future_learning_report_final.pdf). It states that "employers are very clear about what they need to address the current skills shortages – a sharp focus on technical and practical skills alongside the transferable employability skills, like creativity and problem solving, that help individuals thrive in any organisation." Clearly there is a disconnect between the needs of the workforce and the skills that our young people are developing.
Closer to home, my daughter completed secondary school a couple of years ago at the largest public school in our state, and yet they didn't have enough students to run the ATAR Visual Art course. In a similar but even more concerning example, she has been taking an elective art unit at university this semester. One of her fellow students said her school ran an ATAR Specialist Maths class for two students but wouldn't run the ATAR Visual Arts course for eight students. The disproportionately high value our society places on cognitive subjects over those which develop practical, technical, and creative skills is frankly alarming. Surely, the very best education system would encourage students to engage in a broad mix of both, so that they are best equipped to be flexible in a rapidly changing world.
I've written before about how I grew up in a maker family where practical, hands-based skills were an integral part of my daily life. For me, it didn't matter that my formal schooling was centred around the cognitive maths and science subjects that I loved. The balance came from my life outside school. But I recognise that having access to those options was a definite privilege, one which I in turn have passed on to my own children. Before their formal schooling commenced, I spent countless hours playing with them. Our activities included pencils, paint, playdough, paper, fabric, glue, etc. We painted the concrete pavers in the back yard with water, watching the wet outlines disappear almost as fast as they had been laid down in the summer heat. We played in the garden, planting seeds or collecting leaves for collages and we cooked together constantly. There is nothing quite like making homemade pizza with a three-year-old - letting them work and mould the dough before they place the toppings in a delightfully creative way.
I know that the luxury of this time is simply not an option for many families where the need for dual incomes means there is little space left over for what might be seen as meaningless activities. After all, painting concrete with water doesn't produce a specific, measurable outcome, but it is a clean, almost cost-free way of developing manual dexterity and exposing children to the concept of evaporation. Nevertheless, if families can't provide enough resources for this skills development, then we need to make sure that our education system provides avenues to help ensure that those practical skills are developed.
The key factor here is, of course, the increasing role that screen based digital technology plays in our lives. Visit any primary school playground at drop-off or pick-up time and it is not uncommon to see the toddler sibling of a student playing with a parent's phone or some other device so that they "sit quiet" whilst waiting. This of course is just the tip of the iceberg. A 2019 article by Webster et al. (see reference list below) showed a clear correlation between increased screen time and decreased manual dexterity in preschoolers. A 2020 Japanese study by Nobusako et al. reported more nuanced results. They found that there was a strong correlation between increased visual bias and decreased manual dexterity, an effect that might be driven by the type of media being consumed by young children. For example, active screen time where physical skills are engaged (e.g. Xbox or Nintendo Switch) might be less detrimental to manual dexterity than passive screen time where the dominant mode of engagement is sedentary and visual, although their study couldn't draw that conclusion directly.
Numerous research studies indicate that there is no doubt that “screen time” and the pervasiveness of digital technology is having an impact on the way our children learn and the types of skills and biases they develop. Not all these changes are bad, but I think there can be little doubt that increased screen time, especially of the passive variety, decreases the time that children would otherwise have spent developing their gross and fine motor skills. The experiences of my art teacher friend and Professor Kneebone clearly show that this is affecting the level of basic manual dexterity students possess when they present for courses as diverse as art and surgery.
I am not in any sense a Luddite. As I write this, I have three separate screens to hand with access to unbelievable amounts of information for me to explore and research. But we should be worried about decreasing manual dexterity levels in our children. Just as we can embrace the learning benefits that come with unprecedented access to knowledge, we must balance it with practical and creative skills development. I believe that nurturing breadth and balance of skills will serve humanity best as we continue to face the challenges of the 21st century.
This Week’s References
Fundamental motor skills, screen-time, and physical activity in preschoolers by Webster EK, Martin CK, and Staiano AE. Published in Journal of Sport and Health Sciences 2019 Mar; 8(2):114-121.
Manual Dexterity is not Related to Media Viewing but is Related to Perceptual Bias in School-Age Children by Nobusako S, Tsujimoto T, Sakai A, et al. Brain Sciences 2020;10(2):100.
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