Back in the day, the three "Rs" were taught at school:
Part of 'Riting in those days was penmanship, and children spent as much as forty-five minutes a day practicing. Over the years, penmanship has taken a back seat to other lessons and today is practiced, on average, less than ten minutes a day. Yet in my local paper the other day was a cute article about first-grader Cole Kipling, who will represent the state of
Smart boy.
Many experts believe that handwriting is key to learning. Emily Knapton, director of program development at Handwriting Without Tears, believes that "when kids struggle with handwriting, it filters into all their academics. Spelling becomes a problem; math becomes a problem because they reverse their numbers. All of these subjects would be much easier for these kids to learn if handwriting was an automatic process." In fact, Newsweek reported that a 2007 study by Vanderbilt University showed that most primary-school teachers believe that students who wrote easily and legibly turned in more work as well as work of a higher caliber, leading to better grades.
While many of us may lean toward using the keyboard for letters and memos, handwriting remains important. After all, just because we have calculators doesn't mean we don't need to learn math. At the simplest level, handwriting is an effective and inexpensive recording and communication method. It can provide a connection to historical documents and diaries, and, in the case of a power outage, may be a crucial means of communication. For example, during Hurricane Katrina, medical orders and records were written out by hand. While I don't believe students need to spend hours mastering the Spencerian curlicues made famous in the Coca-Cola logo, I certainly hope that students learn to read and write legibly and easily.
Kudos on pointing out the fact that some people focus on the idea that handwriting is not as important due to the use of computer keyboards... in some cases speech recognition software is even replacing that. Also, I agree that writing ties in directly to the rest of a child's learning experience. Children develop a large majority of early skills through kinesthetic learning, it just follows that handwriting should continue to be a "point of focus" in a child's education.
Bottom line, in my opinion anyways, is that handwriting/penmanship was important in the past, and it should be maintained in the present/future education of students.