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Show EDITORIAL: Education's Stepchild "Incessant scribbling is death to thought," observed a philosopher philoso-pher in bygone days. And now, a nationwide survey of handwriting hand-writing and its relation to public education proves that the "scrib-1 blcrs" must reform. Several thousand highly qualified educators edu-cators and teachers have cooperated cooper-ated with the Paper Stationery and Tablet Manufacturers Association Asso-ciation in a "Study Test" about Caching penmanship. The responses very clearly prove that poor handwriting has demoted the art of penmanship to such low levels as scrawling, scribbling, crabbing and "chicken "chick-en tracks." There still are millions of people who just "take pen in hand," and the educators have heaped storms of disapproval and criticism upon their poor handwriting, hand-writing, even condemning it as a "deterrent to education improvement." im-provement." Too many professional profes-sional men have sunk beyond hope of reform. But 600 public school systems throughout the nation can't be wrong in their judgment that "good "penmanship "penman-ship instruction tends to result in belter grades." More than 68 per cent of the teachers said so. And you can't push aside this one: "Is good penmanship helpful help-ful to adults?" Eighty-one per cent of the teachers answered: "Yes." "The past generation" got this wallop: They were sentenced as responsible for the decline in the quality of the average student's stu-dent's handwriting. There was an overwhelming response from teachers in the opinion (72,9 per cent) that handwriting has either eith-er declined or failed to improve. Evidently the public school teachers are doing their best about these matters, inasmuch as 89 per cent of the respondents agreed that penmanship should be taught as a separate subject in the public schools; and many of them felt that it should be part of the program in junior high school. But does this mean you? More than 90 per cent of the teachers declared that letter writing instruction is one of the best ways of teaching handwriting. handwrit-ing. If you lock through your own correspondence with your relatives and intimate friends you are pretty likely to agre"e with the school teachers. The survey shows that most educators are concerned with trying to make handwriting more attractive to beginners and they say the way that this can be done is to meet the wishes of children by supplying them good quality paper, pencils, ink and other supplies. These underpaid school teachers teach-ers throughout the nation have ideas and ideals. Poor handwriting handwrit-ing seems to be a purple hate, but they slow down their disapproval disap-proval because it is a "symptom of carelessness and slovenliness," slovenli-ness," even though in many instances in-stances it leads to "bad mental habits." Floor handwriting, they declare, hampers communication and interferes with the expression expres-sion and free flow of thought. |