campusreview.com.au
Mightier than the keyboard?
Is it time to stop teaching cursive handwriting
in schools? One expert thinks so.
By Kate Prendergast
R
emember getting your pen licence? That enshrined
document among Australia’s school-going youth,
marking the rite of passage from cheap scribbler to noble,
professional scribe. Those endless hours spent painstakingly
connecting one letter to another finally seemed worth it.
But was it? For years among experts and educators, the point
has been moot.
In 2010, the United States dropped cursive handwriting from its
Common Core State Standards. In a fast-digitising world where pen
and paper seem to be going the way of the chalk and blackboard,
who needs it? Can't kids’ and teachers’ time be better spent
learning more future-ready skills, like coding or saving us from
climate change or something?
Or, as professor of early childhood studies at the Melbourne
Graduate School of Education Nicola Yelland argues, how about
we quit imposing our false nostalgia on the new generation,
bin rote learning, and create pedagogies around inquiry and
imagination instead?
Yelland attracted heat in 2015 after voicing as much (and more)
in her article for The Conversation, entitled ‘Teaching Cursive
Handwriting is an Outdated Waste of Time’. Writing with “joined
letters of consistent size”, sloped when appropriate, remains in the
Australian Curriculum. Four years on, Yelland’s exasperation with
this fact has also endured.
“When you have young children starting school, they have
emergent literacy,” she says. “Literacy is about the printed
word, about reading text on signs, on television and other new
technologies. And the text they see is printed. It’s uppercase and
lowercase. It’s not cursive. We encourage emergent literacy, and
then suddenly in Grade 2 we give them this new script they never
see in their everyday lives. It’s crazy!”
Ruth French, a lecturer in educational studies at Macquarie
University, acknowledges the original reasons for cursive no
longer apply.
“Cursive was historically important because of the physical way in
which the ink was transferred onto the paper,” she says.
“It minimised lifting a quill, which minimised the chances of the
ink blotting.”
Now, we have slightly more advanced writing technologies. The
ballpoint pen was itself a remarkable anti-smudging achievement.
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In the years since 2010 however, 21 US states have either
introduced regulations or laws to enforce it as a requirement in
schools. The revival has been attributed to an array of factors,
including nostalgia, a defence of American values (some of the most
important founding documents in US history were set down in inky
quill, after all), anxieties around perceptions of class, and the idea
that some valuable ‘essence’ of identity is distilled in one’s script.
Should we care if Grandma shakes her head when her birthday
cards aren’t written in a fine, idiosyncratic hand? Are there any
other more tangible, cognitive benefits to mention? Could indeed
the rest of the world learn from France, which teaches kids cursive
before print?
French, who used to be a primary school teacher herself, thinks it
still has a role.
“The main benefits from cursive really flow from the fact that if
you can do it efficiently, if you have automaticity – when you don’t
have to think about it – then it’s faster than printing,” she says.
“Like changing the gears on a manual car. When you don’t have
to think about putting your foot on the clutch, that’s when you have
automaticity. It’s the same with handwriting.”
If you have obtained this fluency – and French acknowledges
not all students will – then this is an enormous advantage during
exams, which remain handwritten.
Yelland points out that this may very well change in the future,
and advocates for as much.
"[Cursive] is like a symphony, like an opera, like a ballet,” she says.
“I appreciate its beauty. But as a functional, everyday thing, it’s
redundant.”
Yet even if students of the future sweat over digital keyboards
rather than papers during tests, a separate case may still be made
for cursive.
French points to a 2014 study, ‘The Pen is Mightier than the
Keyboard’, which showed students who wrote down their lecture
notes performed better on conceptual questions than those who
took notes on their laptop.
“The students that used laptops were getting more of the
lecture down – but they weren’t processing what was being said,”
French explains.
She tells her own university students: “Your job is not to write
everything down. Your job is to think about what are the main points
you need to remember. It’s not about transcription, it’s about learning.”
While the study didn’t differentiate between print and cursive, the
factor of speed here could be key. If you didn’t have the ability to
write in cursive, handwriting notes would likely be too laborious and
slow. Under these conditions, who wouldn’t throw their pen to the
side and take the keyboard tapping path? Which, if you agree with the
study’s conclusions, could result in shallower processing of content.
Yelland does not agree. When I mention the research, she
audibly snorts her contempt. “It was flawed in so many ways,” she
says. It wasn’t the medium that contributed to the difference in
results, but the manner in which the notes were taken, she says.
Controversially, she also challenges the very idea that cursive is the
fastest method of handwriting.
“I’m not sure how cursive will go,” admits French. She predicts
somewhere down the line, it might become a more artisanal,
specialist skill, a commerce-driven niche for those who create
beautiful scripts for shop windows or chalkboard signs.
“Personally, I like having a choice though,” she says. “If you’re
not teaching cursive at all, you’re taking away that choice.” ■
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