Penmenship's importance for a child's development of fine motor skills is highly underrated.
Like many things in education, the actual objective is often not obvious and sometimes the neurological benefit is a side effect.
Like many things in education, the actual objective is often not obvious and sometimes the neurological benefit is a side effect.
Same with cutting shapes, posing toy figures, and applying glue. I have a 12 y/o and a 7 y/o and it's amazing to see their arts and crafts development over time as they develop their fine motor skills and dexterity through a variety of teaching methods.
These fine motor skills are precursors to uplevel skills like touch typing. Why not start with touch typing? I couldn't train my daughter to touch type until her hands were big enough (around first grade, but still too small TBH). A 4 year old has an awful hard time using a mouse because they lack the motor controls to precisely manipulate with accuracy (I observed this first hand as my pre-schooler did virtual school during lockdowns -- we switched her to a touch device).
How do you develop those neuromuscular pathways? Through seemingly useless and repetitive training like correctly holding a pencil or crayon, tracing letters with precision, cutting various shapes out of card stock, coloring within the lines, etc. Kids start with gross motor skills that use their whole limbs and then slowly build fine motor skills that involve complex wrist and finger movements through practice of various techniques.
If you observe children with developmental disabilities, they have a hard time performing seemingly basic tasks like coloring within the lines. In many cases they cannot even "correctly" hold a crayon or pencil in a way that allows precise control. Their movements rely far more on gross motor skills because they cannot develop the neuro pathways required for fine control of their muscles [0].
Fine motor skills were perhaps more important in the days of manufacturing (e.g. sewing, parts assembly, wood working, metal smithing) and maybe why Asia seems to be particularly good at manufacturing and assembly of electronics. But I see such skills as still relevant today: touch typing, surgery, digital arts. Perhaps that's a contributing reason to why we don't seen as much precision manufacturing in the West even when cheap labor is available in Central and South America.
[0] My spouse was a teacher for many years, transitioned into special education first as a learning disabilities teacher consultant and now as a special services supervisor.
Maybe they find it hard to teach because they (1) don’t know how, (2) they’ve been busy miseducating people with the hidden curriculum. When my son was in school they were at the tail end of trying to teach handwriting and they sent home worksheets that were titled “Handwriting without tears” which is a confession that this is a sadistic exercise.
Like the practice of having kids “cry it out” in a crib, and the 110% support that bullies get all the way up from teachers to the school superintendent, it’s all part of a curriculum that teaches people that people in authority can abuse you all they want and there is nothing you can do about it, though people like Sam Bankman Fried get to go to private schools where people respect your autonomy and you don’t get crushed down…. They have to crush you down so that those people don’t get competition for running the world.
I did not find art class agonizing the way I found handwriting but my impression then was that there was some small group of kids, maybe 5-10%, mostly girls, who did much better than the rest of us and my belief is those same people do better quality work of that sort than the rest of us now.
Some of those activities like art and music are activities that only some people are going to really benefit from. I learned to touch type, I think, because I really wanted to and because I found working with computers to be meaningful. Had I been exposed to music in a way that engaged me I might have gotten something out of it but instead I got endless drilling with the recorder that hurt my hands and nobody told me how to reliably make more than three notes, something I figured out only decades later after I’d gotten a PhD in nonlinear mechanics enough to understand the sound generation process.
What I know about physical training is that pain (for the most part: the “burn” in weight training is helpful but twinges of pain from your tendons aren’t) is the enemy of progress and that all you get from painful training is no progress, more pain and muscular inhibition. Worse, the experience of pain causes you to get better at feeling pain. Time and time again I learned the only way to make progress was to eliminate the pain first, once I did that I’d go from years of no progress to rapid progress from day to day. Who knows how many cases of chronic pain today date back to kids in school being told to disregard pain and soldier onward through unproductive and wasteful activities?
Of course an inanimate object doesn't want anything, but it felt way more natural to write connected.
On the other hand, no matter what type of pen or pencil I use, it does not feel natural to write connected, so I don't.
My conclusion based on this is that cursive is something we do, because it made sense once, but we didn't know why, so we never stopped when it no longer made sense.
The issues I notice: the stylus must be lifted far off the screen to deregister the touch. It’s also bad at registering where a pen down motion touches the screen if it’s in motion. Cursive writing makes the results neater.
And then in 5th grade, one of the teachers decided that I needed more practice, and did the same thing. And guess what? I got even worse.
It turns out that you can't actually force someone to write better, you can just cause them more pain.
Unfortunately, unless one is born with the resources to pursue a truly individualized education, our education system is designed to benefit the most number of students with the lowest cost to implement. A classroom with 12:1 student to teacher ratio will surely be more effective than a classroom with 24:1, but are you willing to increase your property taxes to hire 2x the number of teachers?
Indeed, many students like yourself will not progress optimally in such a system, but perhaps until AI develops to the extent that we can have a fully individual educational experience that kids can actually adhere to (having seen my 4 year old on Zoom lessons, I think we're a ways off even if AI can build a personalized curricula), there will be students that cannot grow optimally under a "normalized" education system designed for mass efficiency,
They are two different types of neurological engagement.
I hear you: not every child develops dexterity and control of their musculature at the same time and same pace. In fact, some people may have musculoskeletal structures that simply will not allow them to develop high levels of fine motor control. But our education system is designed to train as many students as practical with the least amount of cost.
You're right: there are many ways to achieve it. Some that you mentioned are already used in schools. For example, one thing they focus on it holding a crayon the right way (e.g. not in a fist). Playing with building blocks, dressing up dolls or setting scenes with small toy figurines. This is also why young kids bring home so many arts and crafts as they learn to use scissors (tool use), apply glue with precision, and manipulate small objects.
Penmenship is perhaps easier to administer en mass and easier to grade objectively rather than tool use though.
I do think that there's room for change in the curriculum, but not all solutions are practical and cheap. For example, why not 3D pens? It is easy to objectively grade the result. But it's not practical and difficult to deploy compared to pen and paper which are cheaply available, easy to distribute, have low risk of injury, and equitable.
My fine motor skills qualify me to be a ditch digger, so perhaps the use of cursive did not so much develop my fine motor skills as evaluate them.