It makes me think about the purpose of teaching writing skills, or math skills for that matter. If the purpose is technical proficiency then I guess we have calculators, spellcheck, and ChatGPT and don’t need those skills anymore.

I tend to think that the meta purpose to learning those skills has something to do morality and Justice. When we build math skills we are training our brains to recognize logical arguments and weed out the false ones. This is especially true of statistics. With writing we help people build the skills to express themselves. There is something powerful in a complete sentence. It has an actor and an action. A sentence follows through on what it promises. Same goes for a paragraph and a whole essay. This is a meta lesson of writing and I suppose it goes to Justice when students can recognize incomplete sentences and thoughts or manipulation in others, especially politicians.

So the calculator didn’t kill math because it was more than about that skill.