The curse of penmanship

Yes, just when you thought things couldn’t get any worse, a recent magazine article argues “In Defense of Penmanship” for continuing to teach children good penmanship in school.

The author, Kitty Burns Florey, starts by suggesting that even in the digital age, kids need to learn to write neatly:

Can’t we say goodbye and good riddance [to good handwriting]?

I was surprised to find that the answer is: Not so fast! By the end of my journey into the world of penmanship–from the Phoenicians to the Bic, from monks in their scriptoria to Bill Gates at the keyboard–I’d found plenty of evidence that handwriting is a skill that should be kept alive.

And what is the best of that “plenty of evidence”?

Kids certainly need to learn to type on a keyboard, but they also need legible handwriting–for taking tests, writing reports, working at the chalkboard. Many schools have adopted some version of technology for these tasks, but far more haven’t the resources for it. Children are judged by their handwriting; if they produce indecipherable chicken-scratching, a teacher will not be sympathetic.

That’s right, folks, it boils down to this: Kids need to learn good handwriting because schools are too poor to provide students with the right tools for writing.

It’s pathetic, really. Frighteningly, I’ve heard the same argument from my own child’s teacher.

But the truly scary part is what being forced to write without the right tools can do to children. Florey rightly points out:

If writing hasn’t become easy and automatic, [children will] lose their train of thought, be unable to plan ahead as they write, and, in the end, dislike… expressing their ideas.

She ought to know. She’s a writer, and though old enough to have written her first books by hand, she now uses a computer:

When the computer came along and made cutting and pasting virtual instead of messy, I saw it as the compulsive reviser’s dream machine. My last eight books are children of Microsoft Word, and virtually everything I write, from a long book to a short email, is done on the computer.

Yes, you read that correctly. It is easier for Kitty Burns Florey–and practically everyone else who writes professionally–to write well using a computer: to revise drafts, to keep their “train of thought,” to “plan ahead as they write.”

But we don’t give children computers so they can do the real work of writing: the planning, the revising, the organizing of complex trains of argument. No, we make them spend time learning to write by hand first, knowing that the fluidity of their writing, whether they like writing, and even how they see themselves as students hangs in the balance.

We’re willing to let a generation of children be limited in their ability to express themselves because we’re not willing to give them the tools that adults who express themselves use.

That’s beyond pathetic. It is downright irresponsible.