As we type out our blogs and emails and whatnots today, let's wrap our collective melons around this one...

So I heard this week that there are school districts that are considering dropping penmanship and cursive from their curriculum. The reason? The school day is packed now, and there simply isn't time. More importantly..like..who writes? Right?

I remember we used to have Typing Class. Typing was this elusive office skill that you had to struggle through for an entire year to achieve mediocre results. The offices of yesteryear used to have "Typists" - people specially trained to type things, because idiot fogey bosses weren't trained to do something so administrative in nature. Now we type lines around those old times. Kids typing 80 wpm with one hand. Or we're all thumbs a-blur, texting on our cell phones. I remember last year, during a Psychology class I was taking at a local college, that it actually pained me to write something longhand. It hurt. It gave me cramps to write 100 words. It occurred to me that I had not actually written anything in who knows when. I, the twit who nearly failed Typing Class, am now a Typist.

For me, and for most of the modern world, typing has overtaken the seemingly permanent fixture of writing with one's own hand. Is that a good thing?

"Writing" (and I mean "Writing" in the old sense - you know, using one's hand, or whatever appendage pleases you, to make symbols on paper) was king. Writing was a right that people fought wars over. In ancient times, learning to write, and to read, was a privilege often denied the lower classes. See, if peasants could read and write, they could communicate with each other secretly, and that meant conspiracies could bloom and revolutions start right there under the heels of your oppressive boots. And once this Right to Write was gained for the masses, they never let it go. It flourished, and Writing was the way of the world.

Each and every great speech from Abraham Lincoln was handwritten. All the plays penned by Shakespeare were..well...penned. Reams of paper came home from huddled soldiers in countless foxholes and trenches, scrawled hastily with whatever implement they could beg off their buddies. The whole of history is brought to us by hand, on walls of caves, on walls of stone, on parchment, or on paper, by candlelight, bonfire, or cities ablaze with changing times.

And so now Bubba and Eunice on the local school board want to just sort of..erase Writing. Kids use keyboards these days, so why do we need penmanship, they ask. Why waste time with cursive and print, with pencils and pens...

So interesting to me, this train of thought.

Because indeed,
Why do we need Math classes when we have calculators?
Why have Spelling and Grammar classes when we've got Spellcheck?
Why do we have Literature classes when we have Cliff Notes?
Why do we have Art when we have Photoshop?
Why do why have Athletics when we have video games?
And why do we have History classes when we can just Google it?

Go ahead, think of a class for any burgeoning young mind, and I bet there's a joystick, keyboard, reference guide or search engine that can replace it. Why do anything ourselves any more? Why not hand it over to this handy new Information Age that someone else, somewhere else has compiled for us?

As you replace the uses of the mind, so you replace the mind. You may think this a small concern, but to unlearn what humans struggled to teach for centuries and hand it over to machines that may or may not be there some day in the future is short-sighted and obscenely convenient. The more we do things with our own hands, the less someone can take those things from us.

"Idle hands are the Devil's playthings."
-- Unknown

"Either write things worth reading or do things worth the writing."
-- Benjamin Franklin

"To be a well-flavored man is the gift of fotune, but to write or read comes by nature."
-- William Shakespeare

"Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man."
-- Francis Bacon, Sr.

"The liberty of speaking and writing guards our other liberties."
-- Thomas Jefferson

"Abraham Lincoln, his hand and pen, he will be good but God knows When."
-- Abraham Lincoln, written in his schoolbook as a young boy

"Don't be too proud of this technological terror you've created..."
--Darth Vader - More machine than man.

DM out

PS-
Please handwrite your responses.
Can't? See what I mean?...