If the vast span of evolutionary history were shortened to a year, the invention of writing would take place on the evening of the last day, and it would become widespread only in the final 15 minutes before the chime of midnight, according to Patrick Cramsie in “The Story of Graphic Design.” And this incredible facility, which started with fingers grasping a reed, created “the social foundations of the first civilizations.” We didn’t just write history to record it, we wrote to make it happen.
But if you happen to be a kid in Indiana attending public school this fall, you will find that the clock has already struck midnight, and the age of writing is over, thanks to the state’s Department of Education. You will join, instead, the first generation of kids — now in 39 states and counting — who will give up learning cursive handwriting for the marvelous efficiency, the brave new world, of acquiring “keyboard skills.”
Older Hoosiers are confused and divided by this epochal change. Some are sentimentally attached to neat, legible handwriting because it is both traditional and the traditional sign of a good education. Some wonder whether learning cursive is irrelevant in a digital age. Still others wonder what the impact of not learning cursive will have on their children’s cognitive development.
While I am the first to defend cursive on simple aesthetic grounds (I love writing with a fountain pen), the thought that the pen could be mightier than the keyboard in terms of the way we think is intriguing.
In his 2008 Atlantic Monthly article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid,” Nicholas Carr notes that the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter to thwart his failing eyesight, teaching himself to touch-type and compose with his eyes closed. A friend told him his typewritten thinking was markedly different in style — terse and telegraphic — than his penned prose. To which Nietzsche replied, “You are right; our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.”
Of course, Nietzsche’s blindness was an effect of the syphilis that was also corrupting his mind. One might as easily claim that our diseases also take part in the forming of our thoughts — and who among us would daydream in the curlicues of lyricism if we were conscious of losing our faculties?
On the other hand, James Joyce also battled with near-blindness for years, but his remedy was a red pencil, large sheets of paper and a magnifying glass. His final work, “Finnegan’s Wake,” was anything but terse or telegraphic.
The message here is that people who are fastidious about words and writing can, as with any craft, be fastidious about their methods and tools.
Nevertheless, the philosopher Martin Heidegger worried in a more general way about the impact of mechanized typing on our consciousness, for the way it separated people not only from the physical act of writing, but from the individual way that they wrote, their personal style.
Indeed, the word “style” — a dead metaphor — reveals how much our sense of self is entwined with our script: It comes from the Latin word “stylus,” which referred to the reed used to inscribe wax tablets of clay. The idea that we reveal something about ourselves in our handwriting persists. As the Parker Pen company found out through market research several years ago, fountain pens and high-end stationery were making a comeback precisely because people felt typing was such an impersonal form of communication.
It’s easy to dismiss these protests as mere romanticism, calligraphic schmaltz. But who are the real romantics here — those who insist in preserving a foundational skill that inscribed civilization or those who insist that life will just get better and better the more we embrace technology? Why, then, stop at cursive — why not give up reading, if technology makes text-to-audio effortless?
There are, in fact, good scientific reasons to worry about Indiana’s decision. As Anne Mangen, an education researcher, and Jean-Luc Velay, a neuroscientist, argue in “Digitizing Literacy,” the field of writing research may be young, but there is plenty of evidence that handwriting involves a series of complex cognitive processes in which perception and motor action are intertwined.
“A large body of research in neuroscience, biopsychology and evolutionary biology demonstrates that our use of hands for purposive manipulation of tools plays a constitutive role in learning and cognitive development,” they write.
The neurologist Frank Wilson is even more trenchant: “[A]ny theory of human intelligence which ignores the interdependence of the hand and brain function, the historical origins of that relationship, or the impact of that history on developmental dynamics in modern humans is grossly misleading and sterile,” he writes in “The Hand: How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human Culture.”
In short, we think with our hands — and we think differently when we write than when we type. What this means isn’t entirely clear, but that is the most compelling reason why we shouldn’t be abandoning handwriting now: What if it really is a cognitive step backward?
But if you happen to be a kid in Indiana attending public school this fall, you will find that the clock has already struck midnight, and the age of writing is over, thanks to the state’s Department of Education. You will join, instead, the first generation of kids — now in 39 states and counting — who will give up learning cursive handwriting for the marvelous efficiency, the brave new world, of acquiring “keyboard skills.”
Older Hoosiers are confused and divided by this epochal change. Some are sentimentally attached to neat, legible handwriting because it is both traditional and the traditional sign of a good education. Some wonder whether learning cursive is irrelevant in a digital age. Still others wonder what the impact of not learning cursive will have on their children’s cognitive development.
While I am the first to defend cursive on simple aesthetic grounds (I love writing with a fountain pen), the thought that the pen could be mightier than the keyboard in terms of the way we think is intriguing.
In his 2008 Atlantic Monthly article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid,” Nicholas Carr notes that the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter to thwart his failing eyesight, teaching himself to touch-type and compose with his eyes closed. A friend told him his typewritten thinking was markedly different in style — terse and telegraphic — than his penned prose. To which Nietzsche replied, “You are right; our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.”
Of course, Nietzsche’s blindness was an effect of the syphilis that was also corrupting his mind. One might as easily claim that our diseases also take part in the forming of our thoughts — and who among us would daydream in the curlicues of lyricism if we were conscious of losing our faculties?
On the other hand, James Joyce also battled with near-blindness for years, but his remedy was a red pencil, large sheets of paper and a magnifying glass. His final work, “Finnegan’s Wake,” was anything but terse or telegraphic.
The message here is that people who are fastidious about words and writing can, as with any craft, be fastidious about their methods and tools.
Nevertheless, the philosopher Martin Heidegger worried in a more general way about the impact of mechanized typing on our consciousness, for the way it separated people not only from the physical act of writing, but from the individual way that they wrote, their personal style.
Indeed, the word “style” — a dead metaphor — reveals how much our sense of self is entwined with our script: It comes from the Latin word “stylus,” which referred to the reed used to inscribe wax tablets of clay. The idea that we reveal something about ourselves in our handwriting persists. As the Parker Pen company found out through market research several years ago, fountain pens and high-end stationery were making a comeback precisely because people felt typing was such an impersonal form of communication.
It’s easy to dismiss these protests as mere romanticism, calligraphic schmaltz. But who are the real romantics here — those who insist in preserving a foundational skill that inscribed civilization or those who insist that life will just get better and better the more we embrace technology? Why, then, stop at cursive — why not give up reading, if technology makes text-to-audio effortless?
There are, in fact, good scientific reasons to worry about Indiana’s decision. As Anne Mangen, an education researcher, and Jean-Luc Velay, a neuroscientist, argue in “Digitizing Literacy,” the field of writing research may be young, but there is plenty of evidence that handwriting involves a series of complex cognitive processes in which perception and motor action are intertwined.
“A large body of research in neuroscience, biopsychology and evolutionary biology demonstrates that our use of hands for purposive manipulation of tools plays a constitutive role in learning and cognitive development,” they write.
The neurologist Frank Wilson is even more trenchant: “[A]ny theory of human intelligence which ignores the interdependence of the hand and brain function, the historical origins of that relationship, or the impact of that history on developmental dynamics in modern humans is grossly misleading and sterile,” he writes in “The Hand: How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human Culture.”
In short, we think with our hands — and we think differently when we write than when we type. What this means isn’t entirely clear, but that is the most compelling reason why we shouldn’t be abandoning handwriting now: What if it really is a cognitive step backward?
