Digital competence and education Mon, 27 Apr 2026 Education, Technology, Opinion ================================ Education -- especially primary education -- should provide children with the basic skill and knowledge they will need throughout their lives. I am sure this is an uncontroversial statement, Furthermore, so-called `digital skills' like typing, using computer programs, using search engines, etcetera have become increasingly important over the past decades and there are no signs that this will be slowing down anytime soon. It seems natural therefore to include digital competence classes in children's education. This post is about that. First: some backstory. The summer after I turned 10 I switched to a school where every student was required to have their own laptop. While this is more common now, it was highly unusual for the time, and my cohort were the guinea pigs for this type of education. Before that however, my classes already involved some digital skills. When I was 8 for instance, we were required to give class presentations, and since the school had recently installed digital blackboards (capacitative boards with overhead projectors), my mother suggested I make some PowerPoint slides for my presentation (another highly-unusual thing at the time. Interestingly, now that slides are massively popular, I have stopped using them as I often find them distracting). Secondly, I want to say that many of the SKILLS I was taught in elementary school (digital or otherwise) have been helpful later in my life. I am glad that I can read and write cursive, I have had to do quick mental maths relatively often in my adult life, and a number of other skills (such as the early introduction to publish speaking and presentations) have come in useful over the years. That being said, the KNOWLEDGE gained during those years has almost all proved useless or was repeated in later education. Sure, I can RECALL some elementary school history classes, but I don't actually REMEMBER anything that was said in them. The same goes for geography, maths, languages, religion, and what else. This divide between skills and knowledge brings me nicely into digital competence. Since I believe that -- for digital matters in particular -- skills are way more important than knowledge in early-education. For instance, as an 8 year old, I learned that I should save my PowerPoint presentations in the office 2003 format -- which was that the teachers used -- even though our family computer used office 2007. In middle-school had classes on where all the button in Microsoft Excel were and what they did. And I have had classes using writing programs that I can neither remember the name of nor find anything about. Much of this knowledge is now useless to me. Never did I have a class on how to effectively find and parse software documentation -- the main skill I use these days for learning how to use new tools. No class was given on effective file organization -- and I still have classmates who drop all files on their desktop with nonsensical filenames. Email organization and archiving? Searching by keywords? Window management? No sir. The elementary school I went to where each student had their own laptop took a very hands-off approach to how we were to use our laptops. We were explained that laptops were tools that made some things easier and other things more complicated, and we were then encouraged to discover by ourselves what skills we needed to use them. It was exploring the ins-and-outs of that 2010 Macbook that started by journey into actually learning how computers work, not the classes specifically ABOUT those computers. And that brings us to the questions being debated today: In north-western Europe, laptops and tablets are commonplace in classrooms, but -- from what I have seen -- a lot of what is being taught is still knowledge about specific tools, rather than overarching skills that actually make you digitally competent. At the same time, developing these skills is becoming harder and harder as tools do more and more by themselves. File organization? Unimportant, just use our advanced AI-enhanced search feature. Emails? We will read them all for you with AI and sort them accordingly. Windows? What even are those? All `apps' will be full screen with smart (AI) switching between them. So I guess we must talk about AI now. The question of `AI literacy' is being asked more and more in schools here. And sure, children need to be made aware of the dangers of using LLMs, just as I was made aware of the dangers of relying on Wikipedia. But if we teach these classes, PLEASE let us teach children that LLMs are tools that are well suited for certain jobs and not well suited for others. Teach them that they are useful for rewriting and summarizing texts, but also teach them manual proofreading and summarizing skills, as these -- much like mental maths and reading handwriting-- are valuable skills transferable to other domains. And please: let us stop pretending that prompting or `prompt-engineering' is a skill that one needs to learn. LLMs chatbots are EXPLICITLY designed so that you can enter the most poorly phrased and ungrammatical question in existence, and they can parse it and spit out a competent answer. In short: Yes, teach digital competences, though teach them as TRANSFERABLE SKILLS, preferably by using digital tools to perform tasks in other classes. There is no dedicated graphing-calculator class: you use them in advanced mathematics, there does not need to be a typing-class or MS-word class, or AI-class, just teach the kids the basic skills and give them some digital writing assignments. At the same time: Keep non-digital competences (no I won't call them `analogue': that is even sillier than the term `digital competence' is to start with) in the curriculum: Writing by hand, reading handwritten text, mental maths, drawing, sketching, reading books and maps without a search function, and notebook organization are all valuable skills that are transferable to other domains, just as certain `digital' skills are. Just as a brief closing note let me say that quick-adoption usually leads to some useless things being taught, both for digital competence and elsewhere. This is an inherent risk, and I would say that it is usually worth it. My grandfather was taught Esperanto, my parents had classes on using typewriters, I had classes on MS-office 2003, and `kids these days' likely have classes on a number of things that will turn out useless a couple decades down the line. But focusing on transferable skills seems -- to me -- a great way of mitigating the risk of such useless learning. ----------------------------------------------------------------- All of my writing and software projects are available free of charge under CC-BY unless stated otherwise. I do not accept monetary donations, but if my work has brought you value I ask you to donate to a charitable cause or high-impact fund, organisation, business, institute, or individual driving moral progress.