The following is an excerpt from a forthcoming essay called Pen:
“Have you thought about teaching handwriting?” the clerk at Housing Works asked me, after he handed me a plastic Paper Mate pen and examined my signature on a credit card slip.
We got into a conversation about my love of pens and penmanship, and all the years I put in practicing at the Waldorf-based Rudolf Steiner School, where we watched our teacher write out the lesson in her perfect Palmer penmanship, wrote out the lesson in pencil, then went home and wrote over our pencil writing with a Schaeffer student fountain pen. This began in Third Grade. If I did the math, considering how much work we handwrote and the fact that I did not leave the Steiner School until the end of seventh grade, I spent many hours practicing handwriting as a child.
The perfect opportunity arose when one of my students mentioned, in concert with her mother, that she wanted to learn penmanship. Her school, like so many others these days, no longer taught it. Where to begin? I ran out and purchased the correct student pencils for her age and a penmanship work book. And so began my deeper understanding that the math I mentioned -- about all those hours put in practicing – was the key to the teaching of penmanship. First, the student insisted that she did it “her way”, simply tracing the letters, in all the wrong directions; script letters always begin at the left and move, in a circular pattern to the right. The flow that penmanship is always striving towards simply cannot be achieved if the writer is just tracing letters willy nilly. Second, I saw that without daily penmanship lessons, the student would never put in the kind of practice hours that were required to get better at the skill. Finally, I realized that we were just adding penmanship to our already busy roster of scholastic activities that we needed to cover. Penmanship, like any other craft, needs to be developed over time and deserves the full attention of the teacher and student. It should never just be an “add-on.”
There’s been a debate for many years now about the dropping of penmanship in school instruction. The digital age, lack of relevance, no time -- there are all sorts of reasons presented for not teaching this skill. My feeling is that there are three crucial reasons to teach penmanship, which the Waldorf students continue to learn. First, penmanship is simply a faster way to communicate thoughts on paper. I once worked with a fourth grader who only printed, and quite slowly, I might add. How was she going to get through the fourth grade exam at the end of the year, where there was an essay component? Second, we know from research that the brain processes information more effectively when thoughts are written vs. having been typed. Finally, learning penmanship allows students to read the penmanship of those who came before us, say the Founding Fathers, who penned the Declaration of Independence.
There’s a wonderful scene in one of my favorite holiday films, Miracle on 34th Street, where Maureen O’Hara writes a note at the bottom of her daughter’s letter to Santa Claus, who, for reasons that I won’t go into here, needs support. “I believe in you, too,” she writes in fountain pen in the same perfect Palmer penmanship as our teacher at Rudolf Steiner.
For all of the aforementioned reasons, as well as the joy in writing or receiving a handwritten note, I will always believe in handwriting.
Here’s an excellent article on the issue, as well: