Calculators didn't ruin mental maths. We did.
A defence of fluency that isn't just nostalgia for times-tables.
Every few years someone blames the calculator for a generation that can’t do arithmetic in its head. It’s a comforting story, and it’s wrong. The tool didn’t decide how we’d teach around it — we did.
Fluency matters, but not for the reason the nostalgia crowd thinks. It isn’t about speed for its own sake; it’s about freeing up working memory so a pupil can think about the actual problem instead of the sums inside it. That’s a curriculum design choice, not a hardware one.
The interesting question for the AI era is the same one we never really answered for calculators: what do we want pupils to be able to do without the tool, and why? Get that right and the device is an amplifier. Get it wrong and no amount of banning will save you.
Let's turn the argument into the honest next step.