When I was in hospital having my first baby, one of the senior obstetricians sought me out. He had worked with my husband a decade previously. I was touched, until he told me the thing that made my husband so memorable was his chronically bad handwriting. There were medical notes he had written which they were still trying to decipher.

It would take the skills of a decoder from GCHQ to interpret my husband’s scrawl. Friends abroad have written to ask him to stop writing to them because they can’t read his correspondence. Most of the time, he can’t read it himself. Love letters, vital messages, prescriptions, invitations on the calendar are all indecipherable. Even when printing in capitals, his writing is often illegible.

So reports that exam markers are concerned about pupils’ handwriting are nothing new. I know we are all meant to deplore declining standards in schools — and I have nothing but sympathy for the markers who are paid a pittance and expected to pick their way through reams of unintelligible essays — but the notion that the writers of the past corresponded in perfect copperplate is simply not true. Lord Byron’s letters in Edinburgh’s John Murray Archive prove the point.

Schools are now being encouraged to give senior pupils handwriting lessons amid concerns that an over-reliance on computers and mobile phones is sending the handwritten word the way of the dodo. This is a bit like suggesting we teach pupils how to use logarithms in a bid to compensate for their over-reliance on the calculator, or that we teach them how to ride penny-farthings to make up for the dominance of the mountain bike.

I am all in favour of teaching very young children how to form their letters properly. The only thing nicer than receiving a beautifully handwritten letter on thick cream paper is getting a misspelt note from a five- year-old, the concentration and effort visible in every wobbly character. I have no doubt that elegant handwriting is a dying art but I’m not convinced it is one that schools should be promoting. Rather than taking up vital teaching time by getting senior school pupils to copy out passages in pristine long-hand, we should teach them the skills they will need when they leave.

Theirs is the first generation which is truly computer literate. It seems bizarre that they should be expected to write exam essays in long-hand when as soon as they leave school, they will be expected to produce all their written work on computers. Spelling, grammar, syntax and punctuation are vital skills worthy of examination but handwriting is largely irrelevant.

It would be far better to get all candidates to write their essays on computers. The “papers” could then be e-mailed to examiners. It would save a huge amount of the examiner’s time, not to mention trees. It would level the playing field between girls and boys, who tend to be the poorer writers, and produce fuller essays — most teenagers think and type far more quickly than they think and write.

The hand-wringing about handwriting is indicative of how firmly our education system is stuck in the past. There seems to be a reluctance among senior educationalists in Scotland to embrace progressive ideas. Most schools are only now getting interactive white boards. Computers are still largely reserved for information technology lessons. In most other classes, little seems to have changed since the days of the slate.

I am surprised at how similar my children’s education is to my own. They learn the same subjects in much the same way as I did. Yet the world outside has changed dramatically and nowhere more than in the sphere of communication. New technology has completely revolutionised the media, yet most classrooms have barely changed since the 1950s.

The incredibly sophisticated technology which nearly all children have access to is reserved solely for the purposes of recreation. In a world where limitless information is available at the click of a mouse, it seems perverse to be teaching children to learn facts by rote. It sometimes seems that schools teach everything but how to learn.

Part of the problem is that today’s children are being taught by a generation considerably less computer literate than them, who fear rather than delight in new technology. There is no reason why children should not be able to download lessons on their iPods, complete multiple choice questions on their Nintendo DS or receive homework alerts by text. Yet children and computers are invariably seen in a negative context.

We are so worried about them meeting a sinister stranger on the internet or coming across inappropriate material that we fail to appreciate what a fabulous tool for learning a computer is. We’ve been conditioned to believe that microchips with everything will turn them into couch potatoes. The dominance of Dick and Dom and the decadence of Ant and Dec has led to the new mantra of “all screens bad, no screens good”. As a result, educationalists have put up the barricades and ceded the technological revolution to those with more dubious motives.

There is no evading the fact that the internet, not the park or the cinema, is the place where most kids hang out. It’s time we reclaimed it for them, cleaned it up and made it safe. As a first step all sites with content unsuitable for children should have an xxx address.

Instead of worrying about their handwriting, we should be promoting children’s learning through the media with which they are most familiar. The written word will survive a generation of kids with messy handwriting. Every generation has its techno-fear. Three millennia ago it was handwriting. Socrates warned that writing would replace memory and that the human soul would dissolve if translated into “ambiguous inscription”. How do we know this? Plato wrote it down.