The End of Handwriting, Finally!

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Anne Trubek didn’t make any friends when she suggested that schools stop teaching handwriting in a column for Good. The online essay left a trail of 1,400 comments in its wake, many of them angry. Now she’s at it again, with an essay called Handwriting is History, published in the latest issue of Miller-McCune.

“For many,” she writes, “the prospect of handwriting dying out would signal the end of individualism and the entree to some robotic techno-future… But when we worry about losing our individuality, we are likely misremembering our schooling, which included rote, rigid lessons in handwriting. We have long been taught the ‘right’ way to form letters.”

Good lord, if anything was robotic, it was learning proper handwriting. What anybody with good handwriting may be oblivious to is the shame of bad handwriting. Ridding classrooms of that shame makes room for other things, like ideas. “Typing in school has a democratizing effect,” Trubek writes, “as did the typewriter. It levels the look of prose to allow expression of ideas, not the rendering of letters, to take center stage.”

Want more of this? You’ll find nearly 4,000 words of it at Miller-McCune. Enjoy!

Source: Miller-McCune

Image by lucianvenutian, licensed under Creative Commons.

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