The Write Stuff - penmanship of males

Handwriting is a basic skill that serves us all our lives. Unfortunately, it's not being taught in schools today. Christina Hoff Sommers shows why this is especially bad for boys.

THERE ARE exceptions, but here is the rule: Boys are graphologically challenged. That males have many more problems with penmanship than females is "not even a question," according to University of Maryland special education professor and distinguished scholar Steve Graham. "It is one of the better established facts in the literature." Handwriting is a basic skill that serves us all our lives. Unfortunately, a problem that primarily affects boys is rarely on anyone's list of educational priorities. This one could be solved readily enough, if schools would take the pains they once took to inculcate good handwriting.

Two powerful groups have opposed the teaching of penmanship--the techno-enthusiasts and the progressive educators. The former regard handwriting as a quaint relic of the past; the latter believe handwriting instruction inhibits a child's creativity and spontaneity.

The techno-optimists have been around a long rime. Since the invention of the typewriter in the 1870s, experts have predicted the imminent demise of handwriting. With each new innovation--the telephone, the Dictaphone, the tape recorder--technology enthusiasts have declared the end of penmanship. "Hand-writing nowadays is as out-of-date as the hand-lettered book," according to a 1956 article in Look magazine. Thirty years later, in a 1986 article in Classroom Computer Learning, a middle school teacher wrote, "Right now we may be living in the last days of the pencil-and-paper age.

But here we are in the new millennium, and the last days of pen and paper have not yet arrived. Children are still required to bring pencils to class. Adults continue to fill out forms, address letters, and sign their names--all by hand--on a daily basis. Prospective employers look at handwriting samples for signs of instability. College entrance exams now include a handwritten essay. Even technology is going in the direction of making more demands on handwriting skills. The latest generation of cyber notebooks and Palm Pilots includes a radical innovation that requires the user to enter information, not with a keyboard or joystick, not by talking to the machine, but by using a small writing instrument--a pen.

"I have no idea what I meant," said my bewildered sixteen-year-old David, struggling to decipher class notes he himself had written, but which now appeared to him like something in ancient Akkadian. My son is untroubled by his messy handwriting: "It doesn't matter," he assures me. "I do most of my work on the computer." But whenever I look through his notebooks, I see page after page of class notes, homework assignments, and in-class exams in his manic scrawl. Even in the information age, penmanship remains a basic and essential skill; but it is not a skill that my son was ever trained to master. And he is far from atypical.

Techno-enthusiasts can be reasoned with. Show them evidence that children are harmed by poor handwriting and they will relent. Progressive educators are the more steely-minded opponents of teaching handwriting. For they quite sincerely believe that the "penmanship regime" is stultifring for children. They favor a "whole language" methodology that discourages teachers from the instruction of subjects such as phonics, grammar, spelling, and penmanship. They want children immersed in a rich and exciting language environment that will stimulate their curiosity and imagination and lead them naturally toward literacy, clarity, and legible writing. Here is an early (1957) expression of their philosophy from a Brooklyn College professor, writing in the journal Elementay English:

"When he feels deeply about his experience patterns, he will not only write well he will want to write correctly. The habit of correct writing is best achieved when the child wants desperately to communicate experience" (his emphasis).

This is the kind of wishful jargon we were to hear for the next forty years. How the habit of correct writing can be achieved out of a desperate desire to communicate, but without training, is not explained. Nor does it happen. If the improvement of boys' penmanship depends on their "feeling deeply" about their "experience patterns," most will remain maladroit, if not illegible.

By the early 1980s whole language theory was dominant in schools of education and professional associations, and the direct instruction of phonics, grammar, spelling, and penmanship was out of favor. The unhappy effects on children's reading skills are familiar. Less known are the effects of the lack of handwriting instruction on writing skills. The progressive prejudice against teaching handwriting was many times articulated. Here is whole language proponent Professor Donald Graves in a 1978 "research update" for the National Council of Teachers of English: "Handwriting was one of those early school experiences I have tried to repress. ... [I]t was punishing, mindless, and mechanical whereas composing with ideas was lofty and worthwhile."