The Importance of Automaticity is Blatantly Obvious Yet Weirdly Controversial In Education

The importance of automaticity on foundational skills is so blatantly obvious to anyone who has seriously trained to learn an instrument or sport.

It applies to hierarchical skill domains in general, so you’d think it would be common sense in education (especially math education).

But no, of course it’s controversial in education because so many people disagree on what the end goal of education is.

If the end goal is talent development, then yeah, your primary concern is climbing deep into that skill hierarchy, and automaticity is necessary to make that happen.

But if the end goal is fun/entertainment while checking a box on shallowly learning some basic surface-level skills, then you can kind of, sort of get away with that without automaticity (if you squint) so you don’t think much of it. Why work hard to develop automaticity if you can accomplish your end goal without it?