One cannot view one’s own character from outside any more than one’s own handwriting.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value
Should children be taught handwriting in school? The self-evidence of our answer has become a genuine question in an age of ubiquitous screens and continuous typing. Handwriting risks becoming an obsolete skill, associated with the musty romanticism of the ‘authentic’ writer or the slow thoughtfulness of the intellectual. To students and a growing proportion of teachers, handwriting appears a conservative imposition by the old upon the young, like learning to use a slide rule in the age of the digital calculator.
The question plunges us into the very purposes of education. Is it to prepare children for the world and its ‘screen-intensive mode of being’, or to attempt to offer something better, risking hypocrisy at our own inability to produce this possible world? Handwriting is a symbol of the confluence of the ideals of mass literacy and individuality—the widespread availability of the medium of self-expression in some ways liberated from the standardisation of type. The word inscribed on paper by hand offers an image of the resilience of the world in the face of its dematerialisation in the digital, the fantasy of an authentic scrawl against the constant, growing threat that what we read on the screen is strictly machine fabulation.
Handwriting offers liberation from the screen, but requires a discipline that students hardly feel as liberation. The painstaking process of learning to form letters is taken by some such as the psychologist Ronald Kellogg, adopting the term homo symbolificus from novelist Walker Percy, to be a sort of cradle of civilisation. Like many of its discontents, handwriting is constitutive of administered human societies, and yet, as Michael Tomasello remind us, is far from natural. In other words, children will not spontaneously acquire writing in the way they assimilate spoken language from their environment. Handwriting, then, is a submission to the rules of legibility akin to the submission of the instincts to the demands of sociability. Its foundational role in education is a product of modernity.
Yet as a widely-cited study reports, teachers have articulated a reluctance to impose ‘formal instruction in handwriting’, preferring child-led exploration so as to stimulate ‘children’s interest in writing’. In his 1965 essay ‘The Decline of Handwriting’, E. A. Enstrom suggests that this reluctance began as early as the 1930s. He admits that ‘Harsh rigidity has no place in school and should have been eliminated without mourning. Complete permissiveness is equally difficult to defend, however’. Yet with teachers unwilling to impose something on children, without spontaneous emergence this reluctance jeopardises the very ability of children to learn. Learn what? And to what end? Teachers and students alike sense the growing rift between handwriting education and its purposes.
Drawing a line
Handwriting, like the denial of or protection from screens, has come to symbolise something unstated: the obedience of the child to a task that many adults do not routinely perform. As Madeleine Heffernan writes, ‘Handwriting is having something of an identity crisis, and it’s not just students who have grown up typing and texting who are questioning its relevance’. Handwriting instruction, according to one study, on average occurs only 30 minutes per week. If we persist in wanting school children to learn handwriting, we must reflect on whether the desire for them to have this escape from the digital world implies our despairing resignation to it. By teaching handwriting but rarely practicing it, we erode the justification for doing so.
Students, asked to draw a picture of ‘what writing meant to them’, depicted ‘themselves in a classroom being ordered to handwrite, thinking that they were bored, that it didn’t make any sense and they didn’t want to do it’. Anxiety about handwriting ability has spiked with the realisation that students are unprepared and lack the stamina to complete a written exam. The standardised testing regime, however, hardly works as a deep justification for imposing handwriting education. Angus Holland reports a school in Sydney offering ‘out-of-hours coaching on posture, hand-strengthening and mobility’ in order to prepare students for testing. Scholars insist that ‘students must be involved in the task and not write with the sole objective of meeting the teacher’s demands’. This suggests that students do not trust the teacher’s demand.
Something has changed in the relation between generations. The young, justly enough, gaze with suspicion at the cynical incompetence of the adult world’s response to the problems it has created. Hannah Arendt, diagnosing ‘The Crisis of Education’, described how ‘educators here stand in relation to the young as representatives of a world for which they must assume responsibility although they themselves did not make it, and even though they may, secretly or openly, wish it were other than it is’. It is a consistent, if malignant, habit that we impose on teachers the responsibility for repairing the ills of the world via the malleable putty of children.
Children, however, are not malleable putty, and incorporate from the moment of birth the world as we, adults, make it. For Arendt, there are parts of this world that we assign for the protection of the childhood in the child, and there are parts we assign for the introduction of the child to the world and the world to the child, fragile things that they are respectively. This latter part is the school—a microcosm of society with some of the corners rounded and edges softened. Nevertheless, the fantasy that it is a space sealed off from the corruptions of the world does a disservice to the child’s need to discover their place in and orientation to the world, and disavows the extent to which the responsibility for our world lies with us, to live and improve for these children.
Drawing a circle
A crisis in justification, Arendt suggests, ‘which tears away façades and obliterates prejudices’ also allows us ‘to explore and inquire into whatever has been laid bare of the essence of the matter’. A crisis tests our reasons, evacuating what is taken for granted from tradition or common sense. For Arendt, ‘The disappearance of prejudices simply means that we have lost the answers on which we ordinarily rely without even realising they were originally answers to questions’. While conservative critics tend to catastrophise, and typically endorse a reaction propped up with new versions of old justifications, Arendt warns that a ‘crisis becomes a disaster only when we respond to it with preformed judgments, that is, with prejudices’.
According to Enstrom, teachers in the 1920s and 30s ‘rebelled against arbitrary methods’ of handwriting education. He admits they were
probably justified, even though classroom practices, which evolved from years of successful teaching experience, were sound enough that children did learn to write rapidly and well. Many practices such as drill on movement exercises were undoubtedly used without a clear understanding of their purpose.
The need for explicit justification eroded a practice the implicit merits of which had been built over a long period. The authority of the method came not from knowledge of its justification or purpose, but from its success. Yet as society changed, the conception of success changed along with it, leading teachers to question the basis of their curriculum.
Scholars insist that in general, writing skills are associated with ‘various aspects of academic achievement’ and attributes like ‘visual-motor skills’. Handwriting may, then, indirectly contribute to a broad range of desirable outcomes. On the other hand, it may simply be a symptom of a good education, in which it is taught effectively along with everything else. The link between handwriting and a bouquet of other disaggregated ‘skills’—or more often, cognitive functions—tends to fragment the student into mechanically manipulable parts, each one oiled and greased by innovative educational methods. This model suits bodies like the Productivity Commission, with its fetish for measures and quantifiable outcomes. But like the view that turns minds into brains, it is detached from a broader conception of the student as a member of our shared world.
Moreover, it serves poorly as a justification because it treats the skill like any mechanical part that can be replaced if you can find something else that performs the same function. Need fine motor skills? Try painting, or sport, or calligraphy. These parsimonious neuropsychological justifications ignore the role writing, and writing by hand, plays—or doesn’t play—in our social world, in a way that makes it obvious that calligraphy and handwriting are not the same thing. The effects measured by neuropsychological research are, in any case, vague or suggestive at best. As Laura Dinehart puts it, linking handwriting and behaviour, ‘In its most basic form, handwriting is the exercise of fine motor control, and fine motor activities are said to stimulate the prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain that houses elements of self-regulation and executive function’.
Other studies link handwriting to ‘multisensory associations’ that involve ‘motor planning, control and production skills, and motor synchronisation’. Proposing that ‘writing is not an act that occurs only in the externa observable environment’ but rather one that ‘involves an interaction of internal and external processes’, these increasingly charge the student with mechanical and computational metaphors. The ideal of handwriting education, many agree, is to attain automaticity. This means that the skill becomes integrated—second nature. It also means, sometimes, that we lose sight of why we were taught something. So natural does our facility with the pen become that we forget that the skill was imposed upon us. Handwriting curtails the freedom of the hand, forcing it into and onto lines that are predetermined. A teacher comments: ‘You never know what an A is unless you’ve physically drawn it’.
And yet, given the ideal of automaticity, we might just as easily posit that you never know an A until you lose any sense of what it might mean to learn to draw it. The point of learning to write, like learning to walk, is to forget how to do it in doing it. This has the advantage of releasing what psychologists call ‘high-level cognitive processes, such as the generation of ideas or the selection of vocabulary’. But this makes it seem as if writing were separate from what is written. As any experienced writer may confirm, however, the act of writing is part of what produces the vocabulary. The act of writing is not the act of making marks on a page combined with the cognitive process of selecting words. Writing is a kind of thinking.
Learning to write, however, remains steadfastly formulaic. The inelegant tracing of lines in loops, the conformity of the hand not to the will but to the demand of the teacher, are necessary to produce legible writing. Even the graceful curves of cursive, taught to Australian students since the 1850s, are based on Copperplate scripts enforced from eighteenth-century printed models. Psychologists and education scholars may invent methods and justifications whose frenetic novelty renders them quickly obsolete, but our desire to teach handwriting is more likely related to older ideals, wistfully conjuring the freedom of the open page, unformatted and slow, from the distractions of the screen culture we have surrounded ourselves with.
Progress contra the future
Our wish for education to constantly improve leads to fatal attempts to produce the new by force, leaving us tripping over the present in our attempt to claim our relevance in the future. It also has the tendency to undermine common sense, replacing older methods simply because they are old. The cascade of paper-thin methodological ‘innovations’ tends to bury the ultimate purpose of education. As Arendt warns, ‘Under the influence of modern psychology and the tenets of pragmatism, pedagogy has developed into a science of teaching in general in such a way as to be wholly emancipated from the actual material to be taught’.
Handwriting complicates our assumptions about educational progress: an old, almost archaic practice that is dressed up in anxious progressive justifications that have more to do with brains that students as people. Such progressive justifications close the circle on the future, enveloping it in the present’s own self-satisfactions. The educational progressive is caught in the bind of using newer and newer methods to defend the status quo, yet progress has undermined both the status quo and the methods. No amount of justification can compensate for the change in our way of life.
Education consists, in part, in the transmission of the past into the future. The adult world invites new members to join it, and also opens itself to transformation. Conflating these tasks—the invitation to the old and the opening to the new—means, however, that ‘to prepare a new generation for a new world can only mean that one wishes to strike from the newcomers’ hands their own chance at the new’. Along with the authoritarian teacher, Arendt was equally sceptical about the permissive teacher who abdicated responsibility for introducing the child to the adult world. Arendt’s scepticism about progressive models of education is that they take for granted—indeed, they take from the hands of the children—the shape and nature of progress.
Handwriting is just a visible sign of the crisis of our educational practices. The knotty circularity of our justifications suggests we may be confused about what we imagine education is transmitting from the adult world to children. Our ambivalence is palpable in the contradictions we leave strewn about like rubble of quickly forgotten educational methods. In order to affirm this process of transmission, and to allow children their efforts to burst out of its inevitable constraints, we must in some sense affirm our world and its ways.