Tim Wilson
Auckland, July 1, 2024
What is handwriting like? Mine is terrible; like a doctor’s… a doctor who has been using their own medication. My scribbles are so wretched that even I sometimes struggle to read them. Loops, smears, and burnouts desecrate the pages I inscribe.
Yet, I am a big fan of cursive. I handwrote the first draft of my second novel News Pigs; around 40,000 words scrawled across a series of notebooks.
Why? Handwriting helps me think and create. To internalise a fact, I need to write it down. To interrogate an idea, first I must transcribe it.
Naturally, I believe that handwriting should be a compulsory part of our curriculum. To my surprise and excitement, a Ministerial Advisory Group recently made the same recommendation to Education Minister Erica Stanford. The reason? To improve literacy, our kids would be encouraged to write by hand as much as possible in the first three years of school.
Strengthening the Brain
“Only handwriting activates and strengthens the brain’s orthographic mapping pathway,” their report said, adding, “The importance of writing by hand must be made clear to teachers, and this may represent quite a change for teachers in some schools.”
Confession: these words are being tapped out on a Hewlett-Packard keyboard; laboriously, and in an uncoordinated manner. I miss my pen.
The report added that teacher buy-in was necessary for this (and other changes, including annual testing) to be successfully implemented. That may prove rather elusive. The New Zealand Education Institute’s Mark Potter said that he had “no confidence” in the Advisory Group’s recommendations and that they were written “without any broad consultation with the sector.”
There’s more; the New Zealand Association of Teachers of English head, Pip Tinning called the report “…outdated, …not forward-thinking and …not fit for purpose in our day and age.”
The Digital Future
Indeed the technology argument is often ventured.
Children no longer require pens and paper, they need Chromebooks: the future is digital. Only, it isn’t, not in Sweden which used to prioritise digitisation of education. Last year children returned to a curriculum that included actual books, quiet time, and—yes—handwriting.
“There is clear scientific evidence that digital tools impair rather than enhance student learning,” according to Sweden’s Karolinska Institute.
Moreover, a recent study of over 500 school children in Perth found that they produced longer and higher-quality handwritten texts using pencil and paper, based on criteria such as ideas, vocabulary and spelling. Dr Nina Hood, founder of the Education Hub, insists, “In those first years at primary school, the focus really should be on handwriting.”
May I suggest that there is a philosophic aspect to this too?
Thanks to the internet we are at sea in a tsunami of information, disembodied, paralysed, only buoyed by the dopamine hits from complaints on social media… which are typed. Sociologist Sheri Turkle calls this culture “forever elsewhere.”
Let us help our children be more present by holding a pen that connects their bodies to their thoughts.
Clearly, the debate is just beginning and will require concessions.
I will make a small one. Should handwriting become compulsory, I will write more legibly. Promise.
Tim Wilson is the Executive Director of the Auckland-based Maxim Institute, an independent think tank working to promote the dignity of every person in New Zealand by standing for Freedom, Justice, Compassion and Hope.
