It is recent news that the American state of Indiana will no longer require schoolchildren to learn handwriting. This news has been discussed in America at length and I do not wish to outline pros and cons of such a move. Instead, I present here some reflections prompted by the news. I think that prioritising typewriting is a good choice: today computers and electronic equipment rule. Even if I have used exclusively handwriting in my school days, I can say that the vast majority of my written communication is typewritten, and so it has been for long. There are times that I pick up a pen and find myself at loss on how to use it. Yet, I still use a pen on occasion. I can understand that schools should concentrate on core skills, and the curricula are always expanding, pressuring teachers on balancing what can be done in a class and what must be excluded. In the UK there have been recent calls from politicians to teach how to be a good citizen and other basic skills in Higher Education, alongside the workload of whatever degree one is doing. This is a clear sign that basics that once where taught at school are now being squeezed out.
Since I only worked within Higher Education so far, I consider myself very much an educator, and from that perspective I dare saying that parents should take a greater role in educating their children. The Internet, TV or common sense may help at times, but nothing can substitute a loving person educating children. Handwriting, as well as other basic skills, can and should be taught by parents (or guardians), and then properly tested. Failures in such tests may reveal, incidentally, problematic families. I think that it is unavoidable for future children not to learn old staples such as handwriting at school, but the fact that something is not taught at school should not be immediately discarded as unworthy.
Another thought that came to my mind reading the news was about the role of handwriting today: apparently the best reason to keep writing in cursive is to enable people to sign. In fact there are other two reasons that I would mention before that. First, writing by hand activates the brain, and particularly memory, as little else. Without entering the domain of neuroscientists, that are only recently defining and explaining in scientific terms what (at least to me) has always been clear since I was a kid, writing down things helps keeping them in memory. I have learnt by writing down sentences, as much as I have typed only to forget it all the following day. Typing favours short term concentration, while writing favours long-term concentration. This sentence does not come from a study, just personal experience. It is not necessarily connected, but the fact that younger generations are often attentive for only short times is telling in my opinion. The "stream of consciousness", our thoughts, is normally forgotten quickly (as much as dreaming) because it is mostly useless in the longer term. Anything like typing that is closer in speed and easiness to fix our thoughts on some support, is also likely to bypass long-term memory and other areas of the brain. Writing in cursive is physically translating an abstract thought into material existence. That translation is expensive as far as our brain is involved, slow and therefore time-consuming. It can even be painful to write a lot, but when you write by hand, you write both in your brain and in whatever support you are using.
The second key reason to keep handwriting alive is convenience. What if you need to jot down something at some point of your life? Even with pervasive computing available, it may be simpler to just write something by hand and not use an electronic device. I would point out however that most typewritten texts remain in digital format, at least for some time after being written. There is simply no way at this point to prevent data loss. One may not have the device originally used, or the text may become damaged. Problem is, such devices usually contain loads of data, so when one loses data, one generally loses much more text than what would fit in a notebook (of the paper kind), and one probably will not even be aware of it or remember what was written. Long term preservation of digital data is an unresolved problem, and despite efforts to digitise books to make them more easily available, the best way to read them and preserve data in the longer term is to use paper. As an archaeologist, I am faced with the dilemma of publishing (scientific) data that must be preserved (archaeology is highly destructive, at least as quantum physics can be - do something and the initial state of your subject may be lost forever). To this day, nothing betters sending a few copies of books to libraries, for redundant preservation. It would be printed material, but here the point is that it is good to write a few things with a pen, mechanically. A written note is less likely to disappear. A written piece is also a way to maintain some personality in the sea of data in which we often drown today. It expresses almost imperceptible things that would be lost otherwise. A spoken dialogue uses tones: lose them and the dialogue may become cryptic. A handwritten text also conveys "hidden" messages.
I conclude repeating my initial advice and thought on the issue: make way for typewriting at school, but leave handwriting and other skills in the curricula by involving parents and guardians in the education of children. News such as the one about excessive spelling mistakes made by British workers are also to be considered in the same framework. Handwriting does help in fixing in memory how words are spelt, and it should be another activity that is left, to some degree, to parents. Schools and universities cannot teach everything, there is simply too much to know. Those institutions must be selective in what they teach. This leaves parents to do their bit. For some, this meant camping with kids, now wilderness is rare however, and other skills may be equally or more important in life. Last thought: one never ends learning. Don't believe in definitive knowledge, and don't ever expect to be taught/learn everything on one subject just because you are involved in that field or studying towards a degree.
UPDATE 17 JULY 2011: Unbeknownst to me, Science was going to press with an important paper on the effects of using Internet on memory as I was writing the above. I decided therefore to add a few lines, even if the topic is only one of those mentioned, and not the focus of my post. The scientific study suggests that the use of Internet by itself has no impact on memory and instead it is the understanding that so much information will be available easily and quickly to reduce the use of memory within the brain. In short, the more one is convinced that it will be able to access some information later, the less attention one pays to it, and the result is that only the existence of such information is kept in memory. This makes sense, and is not much different from what happens with books. Sometimes I forget even what I wrote in my own books and papers after a while, at least certain details. Knowing that they are published means that I know that those ideas can be retrieved later. It is the same neurological process, and I certainly do not dispute it. The Internet however has the effect that much information that is accessed today is felt as "archived" (very mistakenly, if you have ever dealt with broken links and disappearing sites for as long as I have). The result is that very little is memorised, and as the study found out, knowing the folder where certain information is archived or perhaps the website where it has been read is worrying. That outcome suggests that we are not consciously reading and learning information, rather just managing and storing it somewhere. For this reason, I still believe that actual knowledge is very important, and for that, "old" learning practices, such as writing down by hand a list of key concepts or a short summary, would still be valuable tools. Our brain is particularly fine-tuned to organise much complex information, but some information is needed to develop certain thoughts and understanding, while other information is not needed so much. Remove most information, and only "common sense" will come out of our minds. Nature has proven time after time that it cannot be explained that way. Handwriting is therefore still very important in my opinion, and I think that we will have to adjust to the Internet (or more likely vice-versa) or experience serious problems. There may be no fault with the Internet and digital data, but those tools have to be adapted to fit us. The reason for handwriting to be so successful in accessing our memory is that the mechanical, slow process triggers multiple senses and provides a feeling of substantial effort (writing can be tiring) and achievement (at the end of the process). Multiple sensorial information coming from several senses is likely to be memorised in some way for how our brains are wired. The simplest information recorded and kept in memory is therefore what is being written, so that it no longer needs to be re-written in the future. Of course, if much is being written and not much is used after a while, concepts will be forgotten making space for new information, but at least those concepts have been in our head for some time, and will not have passed over (or through) heads without being caught.