Article from The Daily News Online
Posted: Friday, February 10, 2012 12:45 am
Feb. 10 Daily News editorial
The year is 2012 and the practice of writing by hand is becoming as foreign to children as the idea of putting a vinyl record on a turntable or dialing a rotary telephone. Writing has been replaced with keyboarding, keypad texting, voice mail and voice-recognition software. Reaching into your pocket for a pen may soon be an activity best left to luddites and old timers.
We hope not, but we recognize that — in the world outside the schoolhouse — there isn't the premium on neat and readable handwriting that there may have been in the past. We agree with the Longview School District, however, that continuing to teach both printing and cursive script to elementary school students remains a good idea.
The Feb. 5 edition of The Daily News contained an article by Leslie Slape titled "Death of Cursive," which outlined the debate among educators on whether or not cursive writing needs to be taught at all.
As soon as 2014, handwriting will not even be mentioned in Washington's "Common Core State Standards," which replace standards implemented in 2005 that require "readable printing or cursive handwriting" to be taught. The CCSS standards are a framework adopted by many states including Washington and specify the knowledge and skills students should have at various points within their K-12 education.
Perhaps a hundred years from now, being "literate" will take on a new meaning and will no longer include handwriting. On that unhappy day, even our most personal messages — love letters, thank-you notes, expressions of sympathy after a death — might appear in a computer-generated font and be delivered by email, perhaps to a recipient who couldn't have read the message had it been written by hand.
We're not in a hurry to see that day come, although some might say it's just around the next bend or already here.
We also see, as many educators do, the benefits of having elementary school students master a skill that requires a three-way linkup between hand, eye and brain. Cursive writing is a talent and an art. We all joke about doctors with IQs north of 150 who can't write a legible prescription, but we've never known anyone who took the time and effort to develop excellent handwriting skills who felt they'd wasted the hours spent in doing so.
The reality that handwriting isn't as essential in the marketplace as it used to be doesn't make it any less valuable as a form of personal expression. Something very worthwhile will have been lost if we're developing a generation of students who can code their own Web pages but can't pick up a pen and put their ideas or their emotions on paper.
Article from The Daily News Online