Ever try to read your physician’s
prescriptions? Children increasingly print their writing because they don’t
know cursive or theirs is unreadable. I have a middle-school grandson who has
trouble reading his own cursive. Grandparents may find that their grandchildren
can’t read the notes they send. Our new U.S. Secretary of the Treasury can’t
(or won’t) write his own name on the new money being printed.
When we adults went to school, one
of the first things we learned was how to write the alphabet, in caps and lower
case, and then to hand-write words, sentences, paragraphs, and essays. Some of
us were lucky enough to have penmanship class where we learned how to make our
writing pretty and readable. Today, keyboarding is in, the Common Core
Standards no longer require elementary students to learn cursive, and some
schools are dropping the teaching of cursive, dismissing it as an “ancient
skill.”
The primary schools that teach
handwriting spend only just over an hour a week, according to Zaner-Bloser
Inc., one of the nation's largest handwriting-curriculum publishers. Cursive is
not generally taught after the third grade (my penmanship class was in the 7th
grade; maybe its just coincidence, but the 7th grade was when I was
magically transformed from a poor student into an exceptional student).
Yet scientists are discovering that
learning cursive is an important tool for cognitive development, particularly
in training the brain to learn “functional specialization,”
that is capacity for optimal efficiency. In the case of learning cursive
writing, the brain develops functional specialization that integrates both sensation,
movement control, and thinking. Brain imaging studies reveal that multiple
areas of brain become co-activated during learning of cursive writing of pseudo-letters,
as opposed to typing or just visual practice.
There is spill-over benefit for thinking
skills used in reading and writing. To write legible cursive, fine motor
control is needed over the fingers. Students have to pay attention and think
about what and how they are doing. They have to practice. Brain imaging studies
show that cursive activates areas of the brain that are not affected by
keyboarding.
Much of the benefit of cursive
writing comes simply from the self-generated mechanics of hand- printing
letters. During one study at Indiana University to be published this year,
researchers conducted brain scans on pre-literate 5-year olds before and after receiving
different letter-learning instruction. In children who had practiced
self-generated printing by hand, the neural activity was far more enhanced and
"adult-like" than in those who had simply looked at letters. The
brain’s “reading circuit” of linked regions that are activated during reading
was activated during cursive writing, but not during typing. This lab has also
demonstrated that writing letters in meaningful context, as opposed to just
writing them as drawing objects, produced much more robust activation of many
areas in both hemispheres.
In learning to write by hand, even
if it is just printing, a child’s brain must:
- Locate each stroke relative to other strokes.
- Learn and remember appropriate size, slant of
global form, and feature detail characteristic of each letter.
- Develop categorization skills.
Cursive writing, compared to
printing, is even more beneficial because the movement tasks are more
demanding, the letters are less stereotypical, and the visual recognition
requirements create a broader repertoire of letter representation. Cursive is
also faster and more likely to engage students by providing a better sense of
personal style and ownership.
Other research highlights the hand's
unique relationship with the brain when it comes to composing thoughts and ideas.
Virginia Berninger, a professor at the University of Washington, reported her
study of children in grades two, four and six that revealed they wrote more
words, faster, and expressed more ideas when writing essays by hand versus with
a keyboard.
There is a whole field of research
known as “haptics,” which includes the interactions of touch, hand movements,
and brain function.
Cursive writing helps train the brain to integrate
visual, and tactile information, and fine motor dexterity. School
systems, driven by ill-informed ideologues and federal mandate, are becoming
obsessed with testing knowledge at the expense of training kids to develop better
capacity for acquiring knowledge.
The benefits to brain development
are similar to what you get with learning to play a musical instrument. Not everybody
can afford music lessons, but everybody has access to pencil and paper. Not
everybody can afford a computer for their kids−maybe such kids are not as
deprived as we would think.
Take heart. Some schools just
celebrated National Handwriting Day on Jan. 23. Cursive is not dead yet. Parents
need to insist that cursive be maintained in their local school.
Readers who want an
easy way to acquire a neuroscience background will want to know about the 2nd
Edition of my e-book, “Core Ideas in Neuroscience.” Check my web site for
available formats and sources (thankyoubrain.com/neurobook). Also check out the
Neuro-education discussion group I just created on Linkedin (type “Neuro-education" in Linkedin’s search field).
