Recently I read an article in the San Francisco Chronicle that argued there is still value to teaching handwriting in schools. While I personally tend to agree with the value, I see that many of my educational colleagues worldwide beg to differ. In fact, there are schools in the USA that are removing cursive writing programs altogether, in favor of teaching students keyboarding from an earlier age. Are these schools technologically progressive, or are they denying students a skill they should still possess?
The following is the San Francisco Chronicle article link that argues in favor of teaching handwriting:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/02/25/INGALO8UUB1.DTL&ao=all
The following is a link to the Indiana News Center article which talks about Indiana’s decision to end their cursive writing requirement:
What do you think? At JAIS we teach cursive in 2nd and 3rd grade. Do you feel this is still a valuable skill for our children to learn? Do you see more value in our students spending time on penmanship or would you rather a greater emphasis be placed on keyboarding skills?
We welcome your comments and discussion!
~JAIS
It shall be both: handwriting and keyboard blind typing thought. but when it comes to handwriting, it must be required to be neat and clean.
Today I came across another good article on this issue. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/16/why-does-writing-make-us-_n_900638.html
This is looking at the actual physical process of writing versus keyboarding. This explains that the two are very different brain processes, and that writing may indeed be the process that is more conducive to learning. What are the implications for all of our MS and HS students who no longer hand-write their notes, but use their computers???
Two justifications for continuing to help students learn cursive from these articles appear supported by evidence: 1. Haptic memory enhances overall memory and 2. Graders penalize those with poor handwriting. The remainder of the justifications fall into two groups. First, there are those with easy workarounds, from writing slowly, to choosing another mode of correspondence, to saving versions of one’s writing during the writing process (i.e. “track changes.”) Second, there are the aesthetic and nostalgic reasons, with which I am sympathetic but with are not compelling enough to continue to require mastery of a skill by all learners.
Of the two reasons remaining, memory enhancement does not strike me as sufficient reason to learn cursive, since the study on which the second article was based makes no mention of a greater memory benefit for cursive over hand printing. One can always turn to handwriting as a memory tool if one wishes, whether or not one has well-formed cursive handwriting.
This leaves us with one reason: students should learn cursive because they will later be graded on their handwriting. Since we teachers do continue to require a good amount of handwritten work (quizzes, in-class tests, etc.) this is a real concern. It is frustrating – one should educate for benefits beyond the classroom, and not create closed systems wherein students need to learn certain skills solely to succeed at teacher-created tasks. From a practical point of view, however, unless we know our students will be with us K-12, and unless we can be sure our own teachers can eliminate their good handwriting bias, we might feel obligated not to put students at the disadvantage poor penmanship incurs in schools.
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