Editorial: The extinction of a skill

Monday, Oct. 16, 2006 | 7:28 a.m.

W ith schoolchildren's ever-increasing use of computers, penmanship lessons are quickly becoming classroom relics.

A recent story by The Washington Post says that just 15 percent of the 1.5 million members of the class of 2006 who took SAT exams used cursive on the handwritten essay section of the test. The rest printed their answers in block letters.

Penmanship was taught for about two hours a week 50 years ago, but now is taught maybe 10 minutes a day, and not much past third grade, teachers told the Post. Many students receive so little handwriting instruction that they have trouble reading or writing cursive. But that isn't such a big deal, some of the teachers said, as penmanship isn't nearly as important as teaching technology skills and foreign languages and making sure that students are adequately prepared for standardized tests.

Other experts disagree. In addition to tuning fine motor skills, important cognitive skills are developed as children learn to express their thoughts through the handwritten word. Recent studies have shown that compositions written by children who lack proficient handwriting skills often are shorter and more incomplete. By fourth or fifth grade, when most work is done on computers, many children who lack strong handwriting skills also have decided they don't like to write, the Post reports.

The sophisticated neurological process that enables human beings to take thoughts and transmit them through their fingers and onto a page takes time and practice to develop. Words and thoughts that cannot be changed with the ease of hitting "delete" often are more deliberately chosen and thoughtful.

Still, one teacher told the Post, beyond signing their names, there are few situations today in which adults even need cursive writing. Teachers are "much more concerned" with students passing standardized tests, she added.

We don't need studies to illustrate that e-mail and text messages have pretty much replaced handwritten letters and notes. But it is important to remember that the electronic communications and handwritten ones typically have huge differences in spelling, grammar and punctuation. Proper capitalization, complete sentence structure and correct spelling often are casualties of electronic missives.

On some level, we are in danger of trading our literacy for speed, as an art once considered the signature of a well-educated adult becomes arcane.