21 December 2009
Back in February 2008, Anne Trubek wrote an article for Good advocating that penmanship no longer be taught in schools. What is surprising is the vehemence with which people reacted to the idea that we should stop ranking children on what is an antiquated and irrelevant skill. Over 2,000 people wrote comments in complaint—some 700 of which had to be deleted for violating standards of decency. Would these people also have us require all children to learn horsemanship as well?
Trubek has followed up with a longer article on the history of handwriting. Her original article is here.
Penmanship is an utterly impractical skill. With one exception I do not recall when the last time I wrote something in cursive—it was probably in high school. The exception is when I took the GRE exam in 2008. For some inexplicable reason, the Educational Testing Service required that we copy, in cursive, the statement attesting that we weren’t cheating. It took me about 45 minutes to write a paragraph that would have taken about one if I had been allowed to use block letters. Even my signature can’t be called cursive script—it’s an illegible, albeit distinctive, scrawl; I was a communications security custodian in the army and having to sign my name several thousand times a month to documents attesting to the destruction of codes and ciphers destroyed my signature.
Since I have begun studying medieval literature and manuscripts in earnest, I’ve discovered paleography, the study of old handwriting systems. Any serious medievalist needs to know the basics of paleography to read and work with manuscripts and their facsimiles. And I’m starting to learn and practice some of these old scripts. But this is not because I will use the skill to write anything. Understanding the mechanics of how a letter is inscribed on the page can often help decipher barely legible text. This is the one practical application for learning penmanship that I’ve found in my adult life. And really, how “practical” is reading a medieval manuscript (as opposed to a modern print edition of medieval writing). There is no reason that it should be taught in elementary school.
I am in almost complete agreement with Trubek, except for her conclusions about the future of handwriting. She indicates that it will die completely. I disagree. It will continue to survive as an art form, as calligraphy. And it will continue to be used for incidental notes and scribblings. A pen and paper can be awfully handy. But it is absurd that in this day in age that we are still requiring children to learn cursive writing and, even worse, grading them on it, holding back their education if they fail to learn an antiquated skill to an arbitrary level of satisfaction.
