Kim J Dickson

Author of The Invisible Toolbox: The Power of Reading to Your Child from Birth to Adolescence, teacher, speaker, parent, reader. Rep’d by Julia Lord Literary

[Barnaby Breaks History 🇺🇸 @CorpBarnaby]

🇺🇸 The 50 star American flag flying today was designed in 1958 by 17 year old Robert G. Heft as a high school class project.

He got a B-minus on it.

The teacher claimed the design "lacked originality" and jokingly remarked that if Heft didn't like the grade, he should get the flag accepted in Washington.

Heft called his teacher's bluff. He sent his physical prototype to his congressman, Walter Moeller, who forwarded it to the design pool.

Out of more than 1,500 submissions, President Eisenhower picked his design.

His teacher later changed his grade to an A.

Thank you, Robert! The flag is beautiful! 🇺🇸

[Athenaeum Book Club @athenaeumbc]

Elite university students are now incapable of reading a book.

Instead of fixing this, universities are simply reducing reading requirements to shorter and shorter excerpts.

This is no mere literacy crisis. It is a civilizational one.

To fight back, we started an online book club to study the great texts of Western Civilization — if the schools and universities won't teach the great books, we must form reading groups to study them ourselves.

Every month, we read a new great work. We've covered texts like Augustine's Confessions, Dante's Inferno, The Count of Monte Cristo, Don Quixote.

We're now reading Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics.

We must study the ideas upon which the West was built if we are to preserve it. It takes effort to read these texts, and even more to read them well. Thats what we're doing, slowly, in dialogue with each other.

If you'd like to be part of this, please join our reading group and consider a paid subscription. It makes a HUGE difference to the time and resources we can dedicate to this project. We are entirely funded by our members.

You'll get:

- Live book club discussions (biweekly)
- Access to our incredible community chat
- Essays to guide you through the Great Books
- All past recordings, essays, and podcasts
- Ability to vote on what we read next

https://t.co/efQaicNvay

Welcome!

[Kim J Dickson @kimjdickson]

@walterkirn The MSM, late to the reality party as always, and reporting as if this is news to people.

[Kim J Dickson @kimjdickson]

@FromTeachrsDesk News flash: the 5 paragraph essay is a basic. Kids can read what they want on their own time. Learning requires effort. Effort is not always pleasurable.

[Kim J Dickson @kimjdickson]

@ModestTeacher Ditto!

[Dale Chu @Dale_Chu]

WATCH: “We made an enormous mistake allowing the ed tech industry to come in and give every kid a computer, a tablet, an iPad, a Chromebook… and the results are devastating and we need to stop.” @JonHaidt via @andersoncooper @AC360

[Kim J Dickson @kimjdickson]

@USAttyEssayli Thank you!!

[Kim J Dickson @kimjdickson]

@walterkirn Exactly the plan.

[Benjamin Ryan @benryanwriter]

A light suggestion for parents:

See to it that your child reads books.

[Kim J Dickson @kimjdickson]

@MrDanielBuck I always did that.

[Dale Chu @Dale_Chu]

“The students who cannot read a 20-page article today are the voters who will not be able to read a bill, or the jurors who cannot follow a closing argument, tomorrow.”

[Jeremy Wayne Tate @JeremyTate41]

Public high school required reading list from 1978

[Jen @jenteach13]

Your child's school has an assistant superintendent for curriculum, an assistant superintendent for instruction, a director of teaching and learning, and a coordinator of academic services. Your child's teacher has thirty-two kids and no copy paper. This is not a funding problem. It is a priority problem.

[The White House @WhiteHouse]

IT’S HERE! 🇺🇸💰 The Trump Accounts App has officially launched.

Now every family has a simple, direct way to get involved and build their child’s future.

Download it TODAY on any App Store and make sure your kids are ready for the massive July 4th official launch. 📱

[Kim J Dickson @kimjdickson]

@KarluskaP Nothing like a communist mayor to drive the kids back to church!

[Kim J Dickson @kimjdickson]

@NewsHour Here’s why…a 2011 picture book predicted it for you.

https://t.co/hExASbeenA

[Lewis Miles @Maga4liberty]

A top education expert just testified before Congress:

This is the first generation in human history that is getting DUMBER after being educated. 📉

Every generation before us got smarter.
This one is declining fast!

Our schools aren’t failing by accident.

They’re producing exactly what they were designed to produce — a weaker, stupider population.

This should terrify every parent in America.

#DumbingDownAmerica

[Kim J Dickson @kimjdickson]

@cryptorover

[Kim J Dickson @kimjdickson]

@AAGDhillon @CivilRights @TheJusticeDept Thank you!

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

A Norwegian neuroscientist spent 20 years proving that the act of writing by hand changes the human brain in ways typing physically cannot, and almost nobody outside her field has read the paper.

Her name is Audrey van der Meer.

She runs a brain research lab in Trondheim, and the paper that closed the argument was published in 2024 in a journal called Frontiers in Psychology. The finding is brutal enough that it should have changed every classroom on Earth.

The experiment was simple. She recruited 36 university students and put each one in a cap with 256 sensors pressed against their scalp to record brain activity. Words flashed on a screen one at a time.

Sometimes the students wrote the word by hand on a touchscreen using a digital pen, and sometimes they typed the same word on a keyboard. Every neural response was recorded for the full five seconds the word stayed on screen.

Then her team looked at the part of the data most researchers had ignored for years, which is how different parts of the brain were communicating with each other during the task.

When the students wrote by hand, the brain lit up everywhere at once.

The regions responsible for memory, sensory integration, and the encoding of new information were all firing together in a coordinated pattern that spread across the entire cortex. The whole network was awake and connected.

When the same students typed the same word, that pattern collapsed almost completely.

Most of the brain went quiet, and the connections between regions that had been alive seconds earlier were nowhere to be found on the EEG.

Same word, same brain, same person, and two completely different neurological events.

The reason turned out to be something nobody had really paid attention to before her work. Writing by hand is not one motion but a sequence of thousands of tiny micro-movements coordinated with your eyes in real time, where each letter is a different shape that requires the brain to solve a slightly different spatial problem.

Your fingers, wrist, vision, and the parts of your brain that track position in space are all working together to produce one letter, then the next, then the next.

Typing throws all of that away. Every key on a keyboard requires the exact same finger motion regardless of which letter you are pressing, which means the brain has almost nothing to integrate and almost no problem to solve.

Van der Meer said it plainly in her interviews.

Pressing the same key with the same finger over and over does not stimulate the brain in any meaningful way, and she pointed out something that should scare every parent who handed their kid an iPad.

Children who learn to read and write on tablets often cannot tell letters like b and d apart, because they have never physically felt with their bodies what it takes to actually produce those letters on a page.

A decade before her, two researchers at Princeton ran the same fight using a completely different method and ended up at the same answer. Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer tested 327 students across three experiments, where half took notes on laptops with the internet disabled and half took notes by hand, before testing everyone on what they actually understood from the lectures they had watched.

The handwriting group won by a wide margin on every question that required real understanding rather than surface recall.

The reason was hiding in the transcripts of what the two groups had actually written down.

The laptop students typed almost word for word, capturing more total content but processing almost none of it as they went, while the handwriting students physically could not write fast enough to transcribe a lecture in real time, which forced them to listen carefully, decide what actually mattered, and put it in their own words on the page.

That single act of choosing what to keep was the learning itself, and the keyboard had quietly skipped the choosing and skipped the learning along with it.

Two studies. Two countries. Same answer.

Handwriting makes the brain work. Typing lets it coast.

Every note you have ever typed instead of written went into your brain through a thinner pipe. Every meeting, every book highlight, every idea you captured on your phone instead of on paper was processed at half depth.

You did not forget those things because your memory is bad. You forgot them because typing never woke the part of the brain that would have made them stick.

The fix is the thing your grandmother already knew.

Pick up a pen. Write the thing down. The slower road is the faster one.