My experiences with handwriting lessons in elementary school were frustrating at best, emotionally scarring at worst. It sounds dramatic, but how would you feel if, in kindergarten, you painstakingly wrote your name on the chalkboard and marveled at its neatness, only to have your teacher walk by and erase it because you used all uppercase letters? Wouldn’t it sting just a little if you received a big red F on a cursive test in second grade because you couldn’t master the curly Qs and Zs?
However, those situations were rare, because penmanship lessons themselves were rare—I spent much more time in the computer lab conquering the keyboard with typing games. But before technology made paper and pens supposedly obsolete, handwriting exercises were considered of the utmost importance. Now younger generations type and text to communicate, and even those of us who grew up writing everything struggle to decipher our increasingly messy scrawls.
There’s no question that handwriting isn’t what it used to be, but just how much has it declined, and, perhaps more importantly, just how much should we care?
Making Room for Improvements
Though people tend to blame computers for handwriting’s decline, the fall began much earlier with the advent of typewriters in the work place. In fact, an essay called “The Decline of Handwriting,” published in a 1965 issue of The Elementary School Journal, lamented handwriting’s “all-time low” in the United States. But handwriting underwent changes even before then when it transformed from ornate, calligraphic penscript to the less flowery form of cursive we’re more familiar with today.
If you remember learning penmanship in school, you were most likely taught Palmer cursive, a style created in the mid-1890s that allowed for quicker and more efficient writing (read: it has less curls and swirls) than its predecessors. Teachers passed down this new cursive to students in thirty-minute to hour-long lessons. But when typewriters were invented and seemed to be the wave of the future, penmanship time was significantly reduced to allow more time for focusing on typing skills. And in the 1990s, when computers gained popularity both in the office and at home, teaching handwriting became even less of a priority.
Why Teachers Can’t Prioritize Penmanship
Today, handwriting lessons are a small part of the syllabus. A 2008 survey of primary-grade teachers in the United States showed that while nine out of ten teachers cover penmanship in their lesson plans, they spend, on average, less than fifteen minutes on it per day. Only 12 percent of them felt sufficiently trained to even teach the subject. But its lack of priority isn’t the teachers’ faults, nor is technology solely to blame; we can also point the finger at standardized tests. A government report in the 1980s called A Nation at Risk sparked the emphasis on standardized testing, and it only intensified under the Bush administration. These days, many schools’ only hope of getting funded and fulfilling the needs of students and faculty is students’ performing well on such tests.
You can’t blame schools for pushing reading and math over writing. After all, once you’re done with school, how often do you handwrite anything? A 2010 IPA TouchPoints survey out of the UK found that adults spend a mere 1 percent of their communication time writing letters. Four percent use texts instead. Since kids now grow up with computers and will continue to use them personally and professionally as they grow older, focusing on skills besides handwriting makes sense. But with that choice comes consequences—namely, entire generations of people who write in chicken scratch.
What Handwriting Is Today—and What We Stand to Lose
How bad has it gotten? Some students’ handwriting is so illegible, they’re allowed to take the written-essay portion of standardized tests (which the National Assessment of Educational Progress will start phasing out in 2011) on computers. Kids who never learn to write well don’t get better at it with age, and depending on their careers as adults, that’s potentially dangerous. For instance, a 2006 study by the Institute of Medicine revealed that an average of one person a day is given an incorrect prescription in U.S. hospitals. Even scarier, about 7,000 people die every year from such mistakes.
