[doodlesdev]

Absolutely! That's why they are students: you learn to walk before you learn to run. Students should be forced to plan their texts and practice getting better at that. Whenever they leave school, they'll be able to write even better texts than the essays.

Honestly, school essays, as a text genre, suck to read. They are not meant to be enjoyable, beautiful texts! Instead, they are meant to help gauge the student's ability at text planning, the quality of their text project, their grammatical knowledge, and orthography.

I must say I'd be open to seeing schools attempting other models, though, and measuring the results thereafter to see in practice what happens when students type their essays instead. In terms of text projects and planning, that could be interesting and train different skills.