Despair

The following gobbledegook is from an article in the Metro about the possible disappearance of handwriting from schools:

'It's been fantastic,' says Fraser Speirs, the school's head of computing and IT.

While he makes it clear handwriting had not been discarded – 'we are not a paperless school' – Mr Speirs would welcome a time when pupils do exams on iPads or computers instead of using pen and paper.

'I think that's something that's got to come,' he says. 'It seems a logical end point. Handwriting already is a dying art and it's you and I who are killing it, because adults are not handwriting.'

Mr Speirs predicts pupils themselves might outgrow it. 'I don't think we're going to stop teaching it any time soon,' he says.

'What you might see is a generation of kids growing up who are as good at writing with their finger on a touch screen as they are with a pencil.'

Of course, it's hard to know whether it's Mr Speirs or Metro who is ultimately responsible for this being gibberish, or whether it's a kind of gestalt gibberish of the two, but first, let us note that the juggernaut of cultural gibberish is well underway, and then, let us see if we can decipher its tracks.

'We are not a paperless school'. Right. A protestation that acknowledges the worth of handwriting. Handwriting is worth something. But, 'handwriting is a dying art' (another lament?) and 'it's you and I who are killing it.' Right… okay… so, if 'you and I' are killing it, and that's lamentable, why don't 'you and I' stop killing it? And these are the people who are in charge of education! It's a vicious circle. A vicious, vacuous circle.

Cue music: