Ban Cursive Handwriting Instruction

www.wiman.us	Education Issues Topic Index A-Z Index	Cursive handwriting
	Education Issues Topic Index A-Z Index	Cursive handwriting

Cursive Handwriting

Introducing Cursive Handwriting as a "high curb:"
Introducing Cursive Handwriting as a Complete Waste of Time:
A Better Future:
Redefining School Resources:
Analyzing priorities:

Introducing Cursive Handwriting as a "high curb:"

Handicap accomodation is basically a science of listening. When a blind person says he could benifit from braille markings in the elevator, a sighted person is not in a position to argue the point.

A walking man breezes over a two-inch curb without ever having a reason to think what a dangerous obstacle it might be to someone in a wheelchair. He is not even taking it for granted: it simply is part of the landscape that never receives his attention at all.

This is how it is with ADD and cursive handwriting. Children with ADD often display "dysgraphia", which is a problem forming printed symbols with the hand. It is a neuro-muscular problem that will lessen as the child grows up - but in grade school at least, the child is stuck with it.

Non-ADD children may also have this problem, or one like it. Children's hands mature slowly; the bones and nerves are not complete until about the age of twenty. Fine motor coordination develops in children at different rates, so insistance on cursive handwriting impacts individuals quite differently. Some have no difficulty; they are held up as the "norm" to which others must compare themselves.

This is particularly vexing in light of the fact that the ostensible purpose of teaching cursive handwriting to children is to help them write more quickly.

As a tutor-volunteer, I witnessed children unable to express themselves at all because they had been browbeaten into attempting a style of writing that was beyond the progress of their fine motor coordination. Their mental processes came to a grinding halt as they struggled with loops and connecting lines. Instead of helping the child to write quickly and easily, the net effect was to make it agonizing for him to write, at all.

Even more disturbing: after short-circuiting the crucial learning years by insistance on cursive handwriting in grades one through six, the schools stop requiring students to use it after grade seven. Certainly this is not intentional, but the effect is a cruel joke on kids whose eye-hand development lagged behind their peers'.

My son Joe actually taught himself to write perfectly well before entering kindergarten. He practiced different letters until he found some that pleased him, and then polished them to his satisfaction. He could do it reasonably fast, it was pleasing to the eye, and perfectly readable. When he got to school it was crushed out of him, and to this day his handwriting is marginal. I am convinced his self-esteem took a major hit along with his handwriting. His younger brothers had similar experiences.

Introducing Cursive Handwriting as a Complete Waste of Time:

One of Lucas' teachers told me that if he could not learn to write in cursive, it would be difficult for him to get a job. I wanted to ask her what century she was living in.

Cursive handwriting is an anachronism, left over from the days of dipping quill pens in ink. When writing by that method, you want to lift the pen from the page as seldom as possible to prevent blotting, to speed writing, and minimize ink usage. That anything so ancient would be required by a school system is no surprise when you consider that many students know more about computers than the teachers do.

We have entered the age of "Please Print." You can't use cursive to fill out forms, and you should not use it to address envelopes. Increasingly, college papers must be typed, or even turned in digitally over a school network.

Even some high schools and junior high schools recognize the blessing to overworked teacher's eyes of a typed or word-processed paper. And to the extent that a computer makes plagerism simpler, it also makes it less necessary by taking some of the drudge work out of written expression.

Only a tiny minority of adults in business write in cursive. Even in elementary education, adults regularly scratch illegibly at paper while expecting children to write everything in cursive. I know a grade-school principal whose "written" instructions are unreadable. I'll bet if he had not been forced as a child to write in cursive, he would now write just as fast and far more legibly.

A Better Future:

I predict that in ten years, cursive handwriting will no longer be taught by elementary schools. It will be offered as an option by high schools, perhaps as part of a calligraphy class, to those who wish to learn it and who have more mature hands.

Children's handwriting will be held up to one standard only: legibility. Beyond that, they will be judged by the content of their expressions, and not the mode. The children will benefit enormously; the pity is that the education establishment will have to be forced into it by diminishing resources and an agonizing reassessment of priorities.

Redefining School Resources:

"Resources?" The most commonly understood of these have price tags on them; i.e., teacher's salaries, school buildings, tax dollars. Important as these are, they are only half the picture.

The unknown resources and expenses include the devotion of the teacher, the devotion of the student to the teacher, the attention span of the student, the available time and energy of both the teacher and the student, the extent to which the student values what he is learning, and the quality of the prioritizing decisions that go into forming a curriculum. This last must take both tangible and intangible resources and expenses into account, along with a careful analysis of the meaning of the fundamental goals.

Analyzing priorities:

Parents send their children to school, expecting them to be taught Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic, which are sometimes inexplicably called the "3 R's." It is this same expectation that motivates them to pay their taxes, arrange their work schedules, and tell their children to obey the authorities at school.

Most conflicts about education arise from definitions of these three ancient goals of education. Another way of looking at them might be "Input, Output, and Processing." This is a somewhat more generic expression that might serve as a platform for analysis.

For example, a great battle was fought three decades ago, over a "Processing" issue when the definition of "Arithmetic" was challenged. The so-called "New Math" emphasized "Understanding what you are doing," rather than "getting the right answer". This had pretty mixed results, and was hailed as a breakthrough by some while it was condemmed as a failed experiment by others (usually parents.)

But that does not mean that mathematical education did not need reforming, and by some accounts, it still does. And that may be the case with Writing, which is a form of "output."

Broadly speaking, writing is the skill of putting one's thoughts into an alphabetic representation of one's own spoken language. This may be done a number of ways; by chisling onto clay tablets with wooden sticks, by dipping a quill pen and scratching it across parchment, or on paper with a typewriter, pencil, ball-point pen, or laser printer. This last obviously requires a somewhat sophisticated array of hardware, at least compared to the pencil. But it does have advantages.

Handwriting is widely recognized as an expression of one's individuality. Ours seems a graceless age, relentlessly commercial and oppressive to the small outlets life may afford to the soul. Why force this one on the children?