What do they teach kids today?

When I first went to school (no, don't laugh!) we learned to read and write. Learning to read was all phonics-based and writing started with pencils and then progressed to dipper- pens.

In secondary school we were allowed fountain pens, which had to be Osmiroid italic pens, and we were rigorously taught in our Art classes how to write aesthetically as well as legibly. This was a skill that was considered essential if one was to survive in the New Elizabethan era, (as it was ambitiously referred to after the Coronation in '53.) Ball-points were, of course, outlawed, and the role of "ink-monitor" - filling the inkwells in the school desks survived well into my teenage years.

One would have thought, logically, that modern Primary education would teach the appropriate written communication skills today, but with one or two isolated exceptions, like Whinstone Primary School, we are raising a generation - generations - in fact, who are totally keyboard illiterate. Just about every executive uses a keyboard on an hourly basis, and the overwhelming majority peer down and tap away with two fingers.

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The technical illiteracy continues with the arrival of PowerPoint, which is almost universally used as an alternative speaker-prompt rather than as an illustration to support the spoken word. But, happily, there are exceptions as this simple but highly informative High School video from the States demonstrates.Yes, it's very amateurish, but I can think of a dozen senior executives who would do well to follow its basic teaching.