The Loss of Penmanship

Have you spent much time lately thinking about how little we value penmanship these days? Personally, I’m grateful since my handwriting has never been what you’d call spectacular. I’m one of those “good enough for gov’ment work” kind of people, especially when it comes to penmanship. And I think I’m not the only one.

My friend Travis sent over an article on the decline of handwriting courses in elementary education. Educators have decided that teaching handwriting is not as practical as using the time for other courses, such as computers.

Cursive writing, once a cornerstone of American education, is becoming a cultural artifact as computers and the demands of standardized tests squeeze it out of its once lofty position.

Taught for more than 300 years in the United States, cursive has a storied past. But in a number of Michigan schools, it has been reduced to an independent study, an "as-we-have-time" course in second or third grade.

For traditionalists, the demise of cursive is an outrage - the loss of a skill, even an art form. People who print argue that there's no point in wasting students' time to teach a vestigial skill in a computer age. For the educators in the middle, pragmatism wins.

And I’m just as thrilled. I have an urge to snicker at any formal document that isn’t typed and printed. And think about it: in the course of a day, how many times more likely are you to e-mail or text message someone versus send them a note? For that matter, how often do you write anything down when you can use digital technology? It could be that at some point our handwriting becomes a mutated strand of Times New Roman, and no one even remembers what the term cursive ever meant. As Travis hypothesizes, “If this happens will graffiti only be perpetrated by the ultra educated?”