AMERICA A RED-LETTER DAY FOR STUDENTS
The Handwriting Is on the Wall
As Indiana abandons teaching youngsters penmanship, let us ponder the inevitable extinction of our old friend, longhand.
By Theodore Dalrymple F
IFTY YEARS FROM NOW, NO ONE IN Indiana — or at least, no one born and raised in Indiana — will be able to write cursive. On the other hand, everyone there will be able to type, and by then technology might have made the ability to sign your name redundant.
If it has not, perhaps you will be able to hire an out-of-stater or immigrant to sign your will or mar- riage certifi cate for you. State offi cials recently announced that Indiana schools will no longer be required to teach children to write longhand, so that students can focus on typing. This is because writing by hand is so very — well, so very 4000 B.C. to A.D. 2010. We have now entered a new era: A.H., After Handwriting. The schoolchildren of Indiana — and those of an increasing number of other states — will therefore never know the joys of penmanship that I experienced as a child. In those days, we still had little porcelain inkwells in the tops of our desks. I still remember my pride in my fi rst full-length hand- written composition: an eight-page account of crossing the Gobi Desert in a Rolls-Royce.
Despite many hours fi rst of tracing, then of copying copperplate examples,
18 NEWSMAX / SEPTEMBER 2011
my handwriting never became other than serviceable. I was left-handed, and this made things more diffi cult because, whether I pushed or pulled the pen, smudges followed my writ- ing. Luckily, though, we had emerged from the dark ages when left-handers were forced to use their right hands. Little did we know, it was the begin- ning of the pedagogic liberalism that has now brought us to the abandon- ment of writing altogether. Another
character-
building joy that may be denied to Indiana school- children is the handwrit- ten exam. They will never know that peculiar slight ache in the forearm, pro- duced by fevered scrib- bling as thoughts rushed through your mind in answer to questions such
My fi rst reaction to the news from Indiana was visceral despair, not only because the world I had known was now declared antediluvian, dead and buried, but because it presaged a further hollowing out of the human personality, a further colonization of the human mind by the virtual at the expense of the real.
When I scrawled, blotted and
Those who learn to write only on screens will have dif culty distinguishing themselves from each other.
as “Was Louis XIV a good king?” (my answer was a fi rm and uncom- promising “no”) and struggled to fi nd written expression, only to slow down once it became clear that there were not enough of those thoughts to fi ll the allotted time. So then you deliberately made your handwriting deteriorate to make it appear that you could have written more if only you had had the time. This continued into my early 20s.
smud ged my way across the page, I had the feeling that, for good or evil, what I had done was my own and unique. And since everyone’s writing was different, despite the uniformity of the exer- cises, our handwriting gave us a sense of our own individuality. Those who learn to write only on a screen
will have more diffi culty in distin- guishing themselves from each other, and since the need to do so will remain, they will adopt more extreme ways of doing so. Less handwriting, then, more social pathology.
Theodore Dalrymple is the pen name of the physician Anthony Daniels. He is a contributing editor of the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal. Reprinted by permission of The Wall Street Journal. Copyright © 2011 Dow Jones & Co., Inc.
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