Cursive gets written off

06 February 2015 - 02:33 By Poppy Louw
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The Finnish board of education will remove teaching cursive handwriting from its curriculum and replace it with inculcating keyboard typing skills.

The board this week announced that the change, effective from next year, reflects the modern priority of typing as against handwriting.

The decision has been attributed to the evolution of technology, which is said to have changed the way people communicate.

But in South Africa handwriting is here to stay for the foreseeable future.

Basic Education spokesman Elijah Mhlanga said the department's curriculum and assessment policy called for the teaching of handwriting from midway through Grade 2.

"The policy also advocates that pupils be familiar with traditional printed script, so that they are able to read printed and electronic texts," said Mhlanga.

Karin James, of Indiana University, and Virginia Berninger, of the University of Washington, both in the US, in a study the results of which were released last year found that the regions of the brain associated with memory, reading and writing were stimulated in children as they developed their handwriting skills.

James said abandoning cursive handwriting would have less of an adverse effect on brain activation than replacing the character-by-character printing of infants with typing.

Finland is one of the first countries to do away with teaching handwriting in schools but Australia is debating its relevance.

More than 40 US states scrapped cursive handwriting as a compulsory skill in 2013.

Cape Town education psychologist Anel Annandale said cursive handwriting was difficult for many children to read because they had become accustomed to the non-cursive text on the screens of their gadgets.

"It is an archaic way of writing and very few adults still use it. Writing by hand is becoming outdated in this era of keyboards."

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