Unthinkable Things #5: Teaching typing

It is unthinkable that children are not taught to type in a world where the keyboard is still king.

Wikipedia sums it up nicely: "Despite the development of alternative input devices, such as the mouse, touch sensitive screens, pen devices, character recognition and voice recognition, and improvements in computer speed and memory size, the keyboard remains the most commonly used and most versatile device used for direct human input into computers".

And yet, even today our children are not yet taught to type as a matter of course. Doing so should achieve more than boosting their ability to compete in the marketplace: it could help them avoid RSI and can even help dyslexics overcome their difficulties with writing. As innovation races ahead with speech interfaces and accelerometers, could it be that the big story here comes back to the fundamentals of school education?