Wow, I’m honored with such thoughtful responses to my post!
DrDeth, I wouldn’t be surprised if, twenty years from now, education budget cuts forced our public school system into a dichotomy: teach typing or teach cursive. In that case, typing skills will win out–a logical conclusion.
However, I am on the fence on whether or not we should take a pre-emptive strike and eliminate cursive now. Here are my thoughts:
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The goal of handwriting instruction at the grammar-school level is to (in my opinion) teach students how to produce letterforms by hand that are 1) legible and 2) efficient. (Note that I’m shoving my calligraphic bias aside and am not mentioning beauty, aesthetics, or even neatness–legibility is a better objective.)
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Teaching printing fulfills Goal #1. It does not, by its nature (lack of any ligatures, multiple pen lifts, rigid letterforms), fulfill Goal #2.
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However, here’s where it gets interesting (and where my calligraphic background actually gets in the way). If students learn to print fast on their own, will they eventually figure out how to join letters efficiently to write fast and therefore, as adults, write in a hybrid hand that is both legible and efficient? I would love to see some scientific studies or hear anectodes on how viable this transition is.
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As much as I love technology, we are still in a transitive state of communication today. Sure, we e-mail, type reports, and participate on message boards via typing. However, for most of us, handwriting legibly and quickly is still a benefitial skill. I had to take notes by hand in college (some professors hate the sound of laptop key-clicking, and many of us are good enough to type notes in Calculus class with all those equations and formulas?) and in business meetings.
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As far as I know (and I wouldn’t mind being proven wrong if advances have been made in the field), a hybrid cursive form is still the best way to take notes by hand. On one hand, maybe we’re letting semantics get in the way–maybe we should eliminate cursive (with them fancy loops and curls) and instead teach students how to write fast by printing quickly and applying selective cursive techniques.
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For instance, it may be faster or comfortable writing “th” with two cursive strokes rather than printing each letter separately. It may be more efficient writing a lower case “f” with opposing, rather than facing, loops. How about writing an uppercase G if you start off writing a “C” rather using the Palmer version.
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Some of my personal examples are illustrated here. Note that this sample is for demonstration purposes only. I normally don’t write like this, and I discourage people from writing like my sample if they value their tendons. (And for the record, my hand felt like cramping when I had to use my long-forgotten Palmer skills.) My point is that students should be informed that there’s no single way to handwrite letters. Students should be able to choose variations that work for them, or come up with their own creative ways to be efficient…as long as people can still figure out what they’re writing.
As for the second statement:
Doctor, I am completely with you on this. In this Digital Era, I am extremely upset by the very notion that employers are selecting candidates based upon their handwriting (unless one is applying for a job in the calligraphic arts, then in which case, you better have some pretty writing!)
Any stories that support graphology sound like cherry-picking and weak correlation. Besides, even the more serious graphologists (like the ones hired by the FBI for check writing fraud) will state a whole bunch of exceptions and generalizations that makes them just as wise-sounding and contradictory as astrologers.
For instance, writing an “m” one way means you have “criminalistic tendencies”, unless you’re European, because apparently, most Europeans are taught to write their “ems” this way. Uneven handwriting means you’re mentally unstable–but watch out, 'cuz people with motor disabilities write this way, too!
And remember, if you write the same letter differently each time, it means you have poor centration, poor discipline, and poor mental focus. But King Frederick wrote his “f” in various ways, which indicated his creative thinking and leadership.
(Argh! The Inconsistency! It Burns!)
dangermom, to be fair, that example of German handwriting is probably closer to my god-uncle’s generation (WW II) than the present day. I wonder if cell phones and text messaging have mangled European teenage handwriting as much as its US counterpart. (As an aside: have you seen cell-phone speak in Italian? Practically incomprehensible to parents as OMFWTFBBQ.)
Unfortunately, I don’t have any studies that conclusively show when is the optimal time to learn Italic. If learning to write is anything like learning to speak, however, I am more old-old-school, in that “younger is better”. Linguists agree that children by the age of 4-7 can learn multiple languages (and have the ability to form all possible linguistic sounds without cross-accents) without any confusion. (As if upper-class English parents were worried that their children would be mentally twisted if they had to learn Latin, Greek, and French in addition to English–the horror! :rolleyes: )
Anectodally, by the time a child is in the sixth grade, s/he should be able to switch to Italic without any difficulty. However, it may be problematic if the child’s schoolteacher insists on an non-Italic hand. I think kids are smart enough to learn that there is more than one way to do something.
ascenray brought up something that made me consider a brand-new tangent:
Now that I think about it, I believe that none of my parents/relatives/immigrant friends even learned “printing”. They may have learned how to form capital/upper-case letters, but they learned the cursive forms of small/lower-case letters from the get-go.
…Egads! The more I think about it, the more I’m certain that they never printed lower-case block letters. It’s either all capitals, cursive, or “spaced-cursive” (cursive letters with spaces between each individual letter). European/Asian educators must have figured out that it’s not important to recreate lower case printed forms as much as to recognize them since they’re related to the forms used in printed books. I don’t even recall seeing a handwriting book on how to print letters from Europe or Asia.
My Og, have we Non-Canadian-North-Americans (NoCaNoAms?) actually been regressing?
