
Stop Teaching Handwriting - robg
http://www.good.is/?p=8133
======
tialys
I'm 18 years old, and I live and die on my computer day in and day out. And
yet, for all of my college classes I take notes with pen and paper. It's
insane to think that a child would be able to get by in school without decent
handwriting skills. Maybe in 20 years, but certainly not yet. That said, the
asinine emphasis on 'cursive' handwriting I got for two years makes me cringe
every time I think about it. That time could have been much better spent on
things that I might actually use in real life.

~~~
robg
Define: "decent handwriting skills". For instance, if I never learned how to
write a G "correctly", I could still take notes and do just fine in the rest
of my life. Teaching that "skill" is a waste of time. Handwriting learned on
your own would be good enough for your purposes. Communcations with other
people today requires a separate set of skills - typing, writing, speaking,
even debating - that aren't taught enough. Instruction in handwriting is a
waste of precious time - developmentally and socially - when there are better
alternatives.

~~~
omouse
This is stupid. There is a correct way to write a G. That's how the alphabet
looks. Yes you can stylize it but it has to generally fit the mold of the G.
If you were using a different alphabet, you would have to learn how to write
the letters/symbols of it.

You are arguing against teaching people the alphabet basically.

~~~
robg
No, I'm against wasting public resources on marginalized skills while teaching
kids that learning is about boring you to death. How many of us have sloppy
handwriting and after how many hours of us being "taught"? Handwriting today
is much more often for personal use. My handwriting is good enough if I can
read it.

Teach typing instead. The child will learn a much more useful skill and with
many more applications. They'll pick up handwriting as necessary (just as they
do typing now). Invert the priorities.

~~~
menloparkbum
There is as much reason to teach typing as there is a reason to teach a class
in how to use the XBox controller. Nobody under the age of 25 has any trouble
learning how to type.

I don't know if handwriting is or isn't a big deal. I don't remember having to
do it after kindergarten. 3rd grade seems a bit too old, perhaps the author is
really just embarrassed her kid is still failing the slow kid's class?

It would be interesting to see what would happen to society if handwriting
class was abolished. Home Economics and running at recess were tossed out and
now everyone is obese and in debt.

~~~
PieSquared
_Nobody under the age of 25 has any trouble learning how to type._

Hmm, I don't know about you, but about 4-5 years ago when I learned to type it
was pretty difficult. It took me a year school classes to get up to 40 wpm.

And recently I started re-learning how to type - using Colemak. But it's
significantly easier, since I already have the finger dexterity. Either way, I
think that your exaggeration is slightly too much. For younger kids, learning
to type isn't as easy as you seem to think it is. (And most of the people I
know now only type at 50, maybe 60 wpm - had they been taught earlier and with
more emphasis, they might be typing at 100 or 120.)

------
maurycy
I completely do not agree. I use a keyboard since 10, and I write faster than
most people, yet I have a fountain pen and maintain all my personal notes in a
Moleskine.

It is hard to me to rationalize it but handwriting enables me to focus
entirely on my thoughts, without any distractions, wherver I am. I stumbled
upon my best ideas while handwriting.

Personally I even believe that people should be taught calligraphy. It does
not make any direct sense but in our attention economy, with constant
distractions, it is good to be disconnected for a while.

~~~
serhei
I also think some calligraphy work in school would be a great idea; not so
much because it improves your handwriting, but rather because it teaches you
to concentrate on what you're doing at the moment.

~~~
maurycy
This is a great point and, to be honest, the real reason why it makes sense to
learn handwriting, reading paper books or mathematics. Focus is one of our
most important assets and without ability to focus it is hard to accomplish
anything.

------
michael_dorfman
This was, without a doubt, one of the dumbest articles I've read on HN in a
long time.

I wish I had better handwriting, and I don't think I've ever met anyone who
wish they wrote _less_ clearly.

~~~
IsaacSchlueter
A lot of the commenters here have brought up that you need handwriting in
order to take notes, and that putting pen to paper has some meditative
qualities that help flesh out ideas. I agree with both points, but neither one
is a rational justification for requiring penmanship of students.

I still take notes with pen and paper quite regularly. I can read my own
chickenscratch just fine, even if no one else can. Who cares? In fact, while
in college, I developed a sort of hyper-condensed personal shorthand, to the
point that my notes are basically a code that only I'm fluent in. That was
key, because it let me spend more time listening to the lecture and less time
drawing fonts. To paraphrase pg, "terseness is what written language is FOR"
;)

If anyone else has to read it, then you type it. Most of my teachers in high
school and college required papers to be typed anyhow, and this is becoming
much more common. It's only in elementary schools that we subject children to
emotional abuse for their lack of calligraphy skills.

As for the meditative qualities of putting pen to paper, that's still not an
argument for requiring penmanship. Most of my "fleshing out ideas" writing
looks more like a flowchart anyhow, usually with plenty of the aforementioned
chickenscratch shorthand all over it.

I don't wish I wrote _less_ clearly. And I can write just fine if I do it
slowly. It's just that my _penmanship_ is almost entirely a purely personal
activity, so as long as _I_ can read it, there's no problem. We should teach
kids to _type_ fluently, _think_ clearly, and draw script that _they_ can
read.

~~~
jpd
In high school and college you are required to take quizzes and tests. You are
not allowed to use a computer, and therefore must handwrite them. Legibly.

------
smanek
It's almost impossible to take notes in math with a computer too.

I tried writing all my notes in LaTeX for a semester, but I'd waste so much
time/energy worrying about typesetting that I didn't pay enough attention in
class.

That being said, I'd recommend everyone should try to take notes in LaTeX for
a month or two. If nothing else, it makes you fluent very quickly (a skill any
computer scientist/mathematician worth their salt will need eventually
anyways).

Also, a student writing his G's backwards isn't a fine motor problem - it
seems more like a memory/symbol disassociation thing (much more serious).
Writing sloppily or in large print is a fine motor problem. Writing backwards
isn't.

~~~
scott_s
My handwriting is awful, but the moment I switch to writing math, it becomes
clear.

I think the reason is that my handwriting is bad not because I'm incapable of
writing clearly, but that I'm incapable of writing clearly at the speed I
want. I can write clearly if I slow down. When I write out math, each symbol
means more. I don't have to write as fast, and getting the exact symbol
correctly means more, so it's slow and clear.

------
megatron
This is ridiculous. TFA claims that we shouldn't teach handwriting because her
son struggles and makes claims that an author used a typewriter in the 1880s
because they probably shared the same problem with nothing to back it up.

Sure, nobody 'needs' handwriting when they're in front of a computer keyboard
but its a lot easier when you're outdoors and need to write a quick note down
(and no, T9 is not the answer), especially given that paper doesn't disappear
when it loses charge.

~~~
robg
Why assume that handwriting wouldn't be learned if it's not taught? How many
of us took typing classes?

~~~
orib
Because there are relatively poor alternatives to it. Think of it this way --
if people were used to T9 interfaces on phones, and you had a T9 pad for a
computer, then most programmers would be entering their code using T9 because
it's harder to learn to type properly.

------
rml
As someone who has tutored a number of dyslexic young people, I have seen this
pattern repeat itself over and over. The teachers at most schools just don't
get it. They seem to think that trying to manipulate children emotionally with
"interventions" and the like will magically fix their awkward/sloppy/inverted
handwriting (letter inversion, as others here may have mentioned, is a classic
dyslexia symptom). It's cruel and unnecessary, and reflects a lack of
competence.

Having said that, I mostly disagree with this writer, though I understand her
reaction as a parent. In the course of my training, I was told that
handwriting, and cursive handwriting in particular, are important to learn
because when done correctly, they reinforce the brain's neural pathways
associated with particular letters and sounds (1). For example, we had
students stand at a whiteboard and write large cursive letters while
reading/saying them at the same time (2). The acronym was V.A.K.: Visual,
Auditory, Kinesthetic. The idea was to associate lots of information (from the
eyes, ears and muscles) in the brain with the different letters and their
sounds.

Of course, most schools don't do that, so the lesson of this article seems to
be this: teaching handwriting to kids is bad for them if you're doing it
wrong.

(1) I'm not a neurologist, so this might be the wrong way to describe it.

(2) The students worked one-on-one in private rooms with tutors that they
trusted, NEVER in open classrooms. This is an important point.

(edited for formatting)

~~~
robg
I appreciate your perspective. I am a neuroscientist, and this subject closely
rubs up against my training. I see nothing in handwriting that typing doesn't
also give the developing brain. If anything, typing, especially touch, seems
to require _more_ fine motor skills than handwriting. And with the possibility
of computer games to help teach typing, and coincident with auditory (hear 's'
versus 'sh' versus 'sp') feedback (which helps normal and atypical reading
development), you could teach typing, reading, writing, and spelling in one
well-designed program while providing different types of focused feedback.
Handwriting not only has less real world utility, but it is also harder to
learn while being a more solitary skill. The more I think about it the more
I'm verging on outrage that so much emphasis is still given to handwriting
over typing.

------
jmcannon
This woman seems to think that sacrificing the pen for the keyboard somehow
makes us a more evolved or sophisticated brand of human.

But when I picture a room full of Americans than can't even scribble their own
names on an application form, I get exactly the opposite impression.

~~~
cstejerean
If you learn how to read you'll know how to write good enough. All it takes is
to replicate the shapes of the letters you read (and how I learned to write in
print since we were only taught cursive).

~~~
tjpick
That's a strange argument. Learning to do something is going from seeing it
being done, to doing it. Seeing the raw material, seeing the end product
(either in you mind or in the world) and being able to use the raw material in
the right way to produce something useful. That is the hard bit - knowing how
to control things to get the desired result.

All it takes to play the piano is to replicate the sounds of a tune you hear.
All it takes to paint a good observational painting is to smoosh some colours
on a paper to match what you see.

It just doesn't work that way.

~~~
cstejerean
It depends on how much time you're willing to invest in it.

------
jrockway
I think a lot of posters are missing the fact that the author is complaining
about cursive writing, not printing. Of course kids need to learn to print.
But the result doesn't need to be beautiful, flowing, and elegant; it just
needs to be legible. Let's spend our time making the letters that they write
useful, not beautiful.

When I was in elementary school, I routinely lost points on assignments
because I chose to print instead of writing in cursive. (I also lost points
for using a pencil instead of pen. Apparently I should correct my errors by
rewriting an entire essay, not by erasing. What the fuck!?)

Even at the age of 7, I considered this silly and realized that the public
school system was a waste. I was right.

~~~
bmj
There is actually a movement among homeschoolers to avoid cursive until much
later in the learning process. We'll probably such a routine with our kids
(and we'll probably have them typing at an early age, too).

I had a very similar experience in school as well. Once I was through with
cursive, I never wrote that way again (my signature is chicken scratch). I do,
however, still pick up a pen and paper every day, if only to write in my
journal.

------
maxwell
Just because we have calculators doesn't mean we should stop teaching mental
math. Same goes for keyboards/handwriting. On the other hand, "show your work"
and cursive do seem archaic, and probably could be dumped.

------
robg
Not teaching handwriting doesn't mean _no_ handwriting. It would just decrease
the emphasis. Besides, I'd rather see touch typing classes from a young age.
Why not simply replace one with the the other? Just as typing is often learned
with no formal education, so would handwriting be. Just invert the emphasis.

Even then, by the end of our lives if not sooner, speech recognition (and
without overt vocalization) will probably make typing obsolete.

------
orib
Sorry, but this is inane. Just because your son sucks at writing doesn't mean
that the pen is obsolete.

Paper isn't going anywhere. It's still the simplest, cheapest, and most robust
of recording information on the fly, and nothing on the horizon is going to
change that; Legible writing will continue to be useful for the forseeable
future, even if it isn't used for long manuscripts anymore.

I agree that the emphasis on pretty curisve forms isn't that important --
hell, I've almost forgotten how -- but legible writing is still very
important.

------
wheels
Handwriting has been a tool of the educated for several millennia, I doubt it
will so quickly fade into irrelevance. The author of this post has some
relevant points, but extends too far.

Handwriting's role is changing, and will be less relevant over time, but there
is and has since the beginning of literacy been a difference between
reproducing texts and taking notes. The former is already irrelevant (and is
the part of the author's point I agree with). The latter won't be for some
time.

And what I consider just as critical, is the basic ability to sketch. On a
blackboard. On a notepad. On a napkin. Sometimes I need to express ideas
visually in a way that technology hasn't caught up with to allow me to do as
versatilely as I can with good old writing utensils.

------
vaksel
It still needs to be taught, but noone should ever be penalized at school for
writing chicken scratch.

------
petercooper
There is a difference between "handwriting" and "writing" and it is certainly
true that there is an overemphasis on handwriting - to the severe detriment of
_writing_ skills.

Being able "to write" (as in, put thoughts and ideas together as words) is
much more important than being able to write (as in handwriting), yet schools
do tend to focus significantly on the latter.

It's important to know how to write by hand, but it should not be considered
even vaguely superior to the art of communicating or "writing".

------
subwindow
I think the perils in this come in teachers forcing _every_ kid to write
perfectly, regardless of any impairments they might have. I have dyslexic
dysgraphia, which literally prevents me from writing neatly. It sounds like
this guy's kid has something similar. Teachers who teach handwriting should be
trained to diagnose something like this and help the kids along not by telling
the kids that their penmanship is awful, but by teaching them new grips or
ways to get around their lack of fine motor control.

------
Maascamp
How many people in this world can afford a computer to learn to type on? Along
that vein, how many schools in the US can afford to equip each student with a
full time computer (since they won't be able to write notes down)?

Get grounded in reality. Writing will be taught for a long time to come, and
rightfully so.

------
noonespecial
_Strong Disagree_ Making marks and symbols with our hands that other people
can read is something uniquely human. Should we not speak because we can text
as well?

To write, to read, and to speak are the foundations of human evolution.
Technology _augments_ these natural gifts, not replaces them.

------
sh1mmer
While I don't quite disagree with this article, I think a lot of people have
raised that handwriting is a useful skill in a lot of places that require a
low-tech solution to communication.

While it is technically possible to get by without it there are a lot of
places which currently don't have an easily implementable high-tech solution
(such as leaving a note on the fridge for your flat mate).

It sounds to me like the author's child could be dyslexic or dyspraxic (I'm
dyslexic) and could use some extra help. The extra help I got in school helped
me mostly with the mechanics of writing, spelling and grammar rather than
thinking issues. But, that was what I needed.

I think maybe she should be complaining more about her son's teacher's
attitude than some emphasis on writing at school.

------
hugh
A lot of comments already, but I'll just make two points:

1\. I suspect that a lot of what's being trained in handwriting classes is not
just the ability to make legible versions of the 26 letters of the English
alphabet, but rather general skills of hand positioning and fine motor
control. Kids need to pick these skills up one way or another.

2\. Regardless of whether you can "take notes" with a keyboard just as well as
you can with a pen and pad, I'm pretty sure it's damn near impossible to do
complicated mathematics without a pen and pad. Or a blackboard.

~~~
DabAsteroid
_I'm pretty sure it's damn near impossible to do complicated mathematics
without a pen and pad._

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=295110>

 _I [Thad Starner] get much more down than anybody writing on pen and paper,
because you can write, at maximum, about 25 words per minute. I can type 70.
So I am much more complete in my notes. I also type LaTeX math notation. So
that means if you have something highly technical, you will get book-quality-
formatted notes out of me._

~~~
hugh
I'm talking about doing mathematics, not just taking down the notation.

Sure, I can type LaTeX too, but once I've typed an equation it still looks
like a mess. The structure isn't obvious. It's not intuitively obvious how to
eliminate some terms and rearrange it, the way it would be if I were writing
it down longhand.

~~~
DabAsteroid
Would I be correct in supposing that you tried Mathematica?

------
Paperflyer
I recently got a letter that was written in a really artful, beautiful
handwriting. It was pure joy, reading this work of art. It would have been
beautiful even if the words didn't make any sense. I wish I could write even
remotely as beautifully... Banning handwriting would be a terrible loss.

------
raema
Might as well not learn to read either. While we're at it learning words is
hard, lets cut about half of them out. I could replace half the words I use
with grunts and get by just fine.

------
pavelludiq
My handwriting is awful. I avoid it if i can, but its a bad idea to not teach
kids handwriting.

------
AndyKelley
While we're at it, we should switch all the keyboard layouts to Dvorak.

------
newt0311
In the spirit of this article, I have found a number of other things which are
no longer needed in the school curriculum and serve only to stress incoming
student.

1\. Writing (already mentioned): Seriously, hard stuff and obsoleted by
keyboards.

2\. Reading: reading is hard, you need to know hundreds of thousands if not
millions of words and _exactly_ what they look like. Obsoleted by screen
readers.

3\. Arithmetic: Boring, terminally boring, requires memorization of multiple
tables or an understanding of the very basic concepts behind it and makes
people hate maths. Obsoleted by computers.

4\. Algebra: Not terribly difficult (unless you are a math major) and nobody
really uses it. Besides, we have mathematica.

5\. Calculus: See point 4.

6\. Mathematics: See point 5.

7\. History: Long, hard, requires memorizing information on so many dead
people. What is the point. Obsoleted by books (or audiotapes as the need
arises).

8\. Science: Seriously, have you seen physics. Soooo hard. Obsoleted by
computers.

9\. Schools: After points 1-8 what does this do anymore?

10\. Thinking: Oops. Still waiting for MIT.

~~~
thorax
While I don't agree with the article, it's not 100% fair to compare the
requirement of this motor (or communications) skill with all those unrelated
studies of human knowledge.

