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Roland Allen is the author of the new book The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper.
In the days to come, everyone from nervous kindergartners to overly caffeinated postgrad students will be returning to classrooms that have more technology than ever before. University professors will walk into lecture halls to be faced by rows of open laptops, while younger pupils will be completing many of their assignments on digital devices.
But is this necessarily the best way to learn? Could it be that a better tool has been around for much longer than the iPad?
Every time I speak about notebooks, the older members of the audience tell me how much they’ve learned from their own copybooks, notebooks and journals. They feel, at a gut level, that the young – who have grown up in a world that defaults to the screen, not to the page – are missing out.
My daughter, born in 2003, spent her earliest years in an environment that seems, in retrospect, bizarrely screen-free. But that changed when she went to secondary school. Her school, flushed with technophile enthusiasm, was one of the first in Britain to partner with Apple. Every student had a sleek new iPad, and many of the lessons and homework were either delivered via iTunes U (Apple’s own education portal) or other apps.
I hated it. There always seemed to be issues with passwords and logins, so it was hard to look at my daughter’s work. What I could see was boring, characterless, typed – dispiritingly dry compared with her elementary schoolbooks, which had always overflowed with drawings, teacher’s comments and a palpable joy in learning. There seemed to be a suspicious number of games on her home screen; Apple, it seemed, found the scheme an efficient way to suck an entire cohort of children into its lucrative online ecosystem. And, worst of all, being a teen, my daughter was always breaking the damn thing. The third time the iPad’s screen needed replacing, I snapped, triggered by the pattern of cracks on the glass, which perfectly captured a Size 4 footprint. Her carelessness was the immediate cause of my rage, but underneath it lay a nagging anxiety, later confirmed by a patchy set of exam results: that this expensive, bothersome, high-tech mode of education didn’t even work that well – for her, at least.
So when my son, following seven years later, was issued a laptop on his first day at secondary school, my heart sank. Would the same thing happen to him? Fortunately, not: for it quickly became clear that the teachers had wised up in the meantime. His ugly – but cheap – PC proved near indestructible, and although his class uses it for quizzes and tests, my son also fills traditional exercise books, so you can tell at a glance how engaged he is with the work, the marks he’s getting, and something of his relationship with his teachers. This personal impression was confirmed in July, when the head teacher e-mailed parents to tell us that the laptops were being recalled, to be stored centrally and only distributed when a particular lesson demanded it. The school, it seemed, had looked hard at the digital classroom, before deciding that pens and paper worked better after all.
My kids’ experiences of the screen chime with academic research into this area. Educational researchers have shown that paper notebooks have an edge over their digital counterparts; numerous studies have shown, for instance, that college students who type lecture notes don’t learn as well as those who write them by hand. This is partly because typing encourages students to record, verbatim, exactly what the teacher says. You can type as fast as your professor can speak, so students don’t practise the vital skills of paraphrasing, summarizing and content-mapping, which are much more effective ways of encoding new information in the brain. Students rapidly forget typed notes, and may fail to understand their meaning; if they have to actively think new concepts through as they record them on the page by hand, they apprehend them much better.
Meanwhile, Japanese neurologists, using MRI scanners to see what goes on in our brains, report that the synapses of notebook writers are much busier than those of device tappers. Multiple regions – the hippocampus, the precuneus, the visual cortex and the frontal lobes – fire up when we put pen to paper, in a rich pattern of mental activity that implies a profound interaction with the subject at hand. The physical effort of handwriting and its tactile sensory qualities undoubtedly play a part in this; so does the emotional satisfaction of filling a notebook, and transforming it from impersonal blank pages into a unique, personal artifact. Our digital notes, by contrast, seem disturbingly transitory; pixels scroll off the top of the screen and vanish into a mysterious half-life. You know they’re in there, somewhere, but they lack physical properties and personality.
This neurological effectiveness explains my children’s experiences, and also the surprisingly important role that the notebook has played in our shared history. For six centuries, notebooks were the best information technology we had; businesses kept their accounts in handwritten ledgers, artists practised in sketchbooks and – most significantly if we’re thinking about education – schoolchildren and university students had to make common-place books. Common-placing, an elegant note-taking system, revolutionized education 500 years ago, training young learners in habits of thought that served them well as they matured. Shakespeare, Newton and Virginia Woolf were among millions to practise it, learning how to select the most important parts of their reading before writing down a quotation under a thematic header at the top of the page. Headwords varied according to what you read; “Tyranny” or “Caesar,” perhaps, if you were historically inclined; “Sin” or “Faith” if you thought more about spiritual matters. Over time, a student filled their notebook with the best bits of the poets, historians, philosophers and theologians that they read, placing thousands of quotations under the best headwords. Doing so, they created a unique personal encyclopedia that, by juxtaposing related but contrasting ideas, allowed them to puzzle out their own views on every subject under the sun. This made for an enviable intellectual training.
But they were hard work. Renaissance common-place books took years of schooling to fill, and I don’t see them making a comeback in the age of Google. When knowledge is so easy to access, why should we carry it about in our heads? Why should we spend thousands of hours with pen in hand, carefully copying out chunks of what we read? As a heavy Wikipedia user myself, I’ve a good deal of sympathy for this argument. We live in a golden age of information, and it would be pointless to erect a laborious barrier around it. Tablets, computers and smartphones are fantastic tools for so many tasks, and we – and our children – should master them.
But we should also, from time to time, pick up a pen, and do some of our thinking on paper. Wherever we are on life’s journey, we can benefit from the practice, but I’m convinced that it is most important of all in the classroom. Learners of all ages should be handwriting more, and typing less.