‘We are fighting a losing battle,’ Philip Hensher writes in The Missing Ink, his funny, exasperated book in defence of handwriting.[*] He has no difficulty spotting the enemy. Consider the advice from the Indiana Department of Education last year that only proficiency with a keyboard would be expected of pupils in its charge. (Schools ‘can continue to teach handwriting if they want’.) Or an interview in the Telegraph with ‘a psychologist called Dr Scott Hamilton’, who suggests that if pupils know how to sign their name in a cursive hand, teachers should leave it at that. ‘The time allocated for cursive instruction,’ Hamilton goes on, ‘could then be devoted to learning keyboarding and typing skills.’ The rot must have set in with the typewriter. Hensher is appalled to record that the typewriter was invoked in the 1970s by a principal in London who couldn’t see why pupils needed to put pen to paper at all. No legible hand without an intelligent head is the moral for Hensher here.

LRB 8 November 2012 | PDF Download