A passing glance at Maine schools would indicate that the answer is yes … and no.  Maine’s very own Department of Education was stumped, passing me from office to office in a desperate attempt to get rid of me.  Finally, a DOE official told me in blunt terms what I was already beginning to suspect; the state of Maine has no standard of achievement or assessment for penmanship, no data in the state’s Learning Results on penmanship, and the only developmental requirement for Maine students is that their handwriting be “legible” as subjectively defined by the local school systems.

That hasn’t deterred public schools from finding new ways to torture students.  Brunswick is currently implementing a new teaching strategy that focuses on cursive.  According to an official in the superintendent’s office, teachers have been finding that students’ cursive writing is frequently sub-par, while printing is rarely a problem.  When pressed to divulge the importance or value of teaching cursive, the official was puzzled.  “It’s obvious that students need to be able to write in cursive,” he said.

But is it?  Not according to a growing number of educators in both K-12 and higher education institutions.  As access to computers becomes more universal, typing may supplant handwriting as a primary component of early-education curriculum.  After all, why drill students on something that is never really assessed?

Anne Trubek, a columnist for Good Magazine and a former educator, argues that we cling to handwriting out of a romantic notion that it expresses identity, that an individual’s style of penmanship says something about that person.  In reality it may not even be that complicated.  Our attachment to teaching handwriting may spring out of strict deference to the fact that we’ve always taught it, therefore students should keep learning it.

While that’s never a good reason to do anything, the results of a study released by Stephen Graham of Vanderbilt University late last year suggests that there is a good reason for continuing the practice.  The study revealed that a majority of primary school teachers believe in a direct relationship between good penmanship and good grades, and some educators have suggested that learning cursive may be valuable to dyslexic students, since cursive letters like “b” and “d” are more unique than their print counterparts and are therefore less likely to be reversed.  A similar developmental argument could be made for all early-education students, that the more automatic handwriting becomes for them through hours and hours of practice, the less hindrance they will encounter in reading and writing as they progress.

Jack Mahoney, founder of Maine Prep in Brunswick, is inclined to disagree.  The College Board representative  that spoke at a seminar he attended suggested that, “Handwriting has never been a sufficient issue to cost a student a grade.”  Ironic, since the College Board felt the handwritten essay, formerly on the Writing SAT II, so integral to the college admission process that it included the section on the SAT in 2005.

As for the Graham study, Mahoney is not surprised at the results but cautions, “If you’re a teacher and you’re distracted from the writer’s train of thought because you can’t read it, then how can you appreciate it?”  The relationship between good penmanship and good grades would have much more to do with the teacher than the student.  A quality assignment completed in sloppy handwriting is likely to be judged more harshly than a quality assignment written in neat handwriting.  The grade wouldn’t necessarily reflect any developmental relationship between penmanship and performance as much as the teacher’s mood and level of frustration while reading the assignment.

The demotion of handwriting in curricula across the nation may just be a case of lowered expectation for students (something America excels at), but really, what’s the harm in that?  Nobody’s talking about completely glossing over the ABCs of forming letters in 1st grade.  It’s all the torturous drilling and the tears that follow that have people like Anne Trubek up in arms. 

It’ll take much more than e-mail to kill off handwriting for good anyway.  For some, the link between thought and expression is more fluid with the flick of the wrist than the pounding of keys.  Like myself.  I wrote most of this story with a pen and paper first.