By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
D.R.K. of Sheridan, Ore., writes to comment on the November 11 edition of First Teachers, which centered on an article in America magazine by Charles Zech, the director of Villanova University’s Center for Church Management and Business Ethics. In his article, Zech offered three alternative proposals to save Catholic schools.
D.R.K. contends “none of them is viable. Two rely heavily on financial support from the government, which always results in secular interference in the faith. The third requires large continuing sums of money from hard-strapped parents, which would be difficult to maintain for any length of time.”
What D.R.K. proposes instead is that we “dump the whole concept of brick-and-mortar schools.” He argues these schools “are becoming counterproductive, and that we should turn instead turn to a home-based construct, relying heavily on new and dynamic computer programming, which individual parents will be able to organize to accommodate their children’s education. I’ve watched my grandchildren (ages 1-10),” D.R.K. continues, “play problem-solving games, interactive games, and competitive games on small, cheap iPads. They never get bored and they are always eager to play. Why not replicate this experience in their formal education?”
D.R.K. realizes that “people over the age of 50 may have no concept of how these games are constructed and produced,” but is convinced that “many Catholic graduates of good Catholic colleges will be familiar with this type of educational tool. It should not be impossible or overly expensive to construct games like these to teach Catholic faith and doctrine, English, math, science, and history. These programs and games could be used by large Catholic families for all their children at no great expense.”
For those who are not yet ready to give up on brick and mortar schools in favor of computer programs, we offer an e-mail from C.Z., a reader from Chicago. He calls our attention to an approach to providing funding for Catholic schools that is working well in his city:
“The Big Shoulders Fund. Almost 30 years since its funding by the late Joseph Cardinal Bernardin, the fund has raised and distributed over $300 million to the Chicago inner-city Catholic schools. Without Big Shoulders, Catholic education would be gone from the inner city. At this point, the fund has also assumed the direct deficit of 13 schools, keeping them open and a viable Catholic presence in certain disadvantaged areas of the city. This year, the fund will award between $8 and $9 million in support to over 5,000 students who attend Catholic grade and high schools here in Chicago.” Additional information about the fund’s work can be found at its website, bigshouldersfund.org.
In the October 6 and November 11 editions of this column, readers exchanged views on the decision by many school districts to eliminate the teaching of cursive writing from their curricula. Kate Gladstone, the CEO of Handwriting That Works and director of the World Handwriting Contest, offers some observations on this topic. Additional information can be found at her website: HandwritingThatWorks.com.
Gladstone rejects the claim that cursive writing permits us to write faster. “The research is surprising. It has been documented that legible cursive writing averages no faster than printed handwriting of equal or greater legibility.” Gladstone cites numerous studies to substantiate this position on her website.
“More recently, it has also been documented that cursive does not objectively improve the reading, spelling, or language of students who have dyslexia/dysgraphia. This is what I’d expect from my own experience, by the way. As a handwriting teacher and remediator, I see numerous children, teens, and adults — dyslexic and otherwise — for whom cursive poses even more difficulties than print-writing.”
What of the objection that students who do not know cursive will not be able to read things that will continue to be written in cursive for many years to come by members of our society, as well as the historical documents that exist only in cursive, e.g., letters from historical figures and documents such as the Declaration of Independence?
Gladstone’s answer is direct. We should teach students to read cursive, but need not also teach them to write in cursive. “Reading cursive, simply reading it, can be taught in just 30 to 60 minutes — even to five or six-year-olds (including those with dyslexia) once they read ordinary print. All that’s required is to show them, step by step, how the letter-shapes they already know gradually became the fancier ones that they sometimes see. Given the importance of reading cursive, why not simply teach this vital skill — once children can read print — instead of leaving it to depend upon whether a child can ‘pick it up’ by learning to write in cursive, too?
“We don’t require our children to learn to make their own pencils (or build their own printing presses) before we teach them how to read and write. Why require them to write cursive before we teach them how to read it? Why not simply teach children to read cursive?”
Gladstone believes it is a losing crusade to seek to preserve cursive; that that battle has been lost. She notes that “in 2012, handwriting teachers across North America were surveyed at a conference hosted by Zaner-Bloser, a publisher of cursive textbooks. Only 37 percent wrote in cursive; another 8 percent printed. The majority — 55 percent — wrote with some elements resembling print-writing. Most handwriting in the real world — 75 percent of the response totals, so far — consists of print-like letters with occasional joins as in cursive.
“When even most handwriting teachers do not themselves use cursive, why glorify it? What, I wonder, are the educational and psychological effects of teaching, or trying to teach, something that students can probably see for themselves is no longer a fact?”
Gladstone closes with the following: “By now, you’re probably wondering: ‘What about signatures? Will we still have legally valid signatures if we stop signing our names in cursive?’ Brace yourself: In state and federal law, cursive signatures have no special legal validity over any other kind. (Hard to believe? Ask any attorney!) If you ask document examiners (these are specialists in the identification of signatures, the verification of documents, etc.), you will find that the least forgeable signatures are the plainest. Most cursive signatures are loose scrawls: The rest, if they follow the rules of cursive at all, are fairly complicated: These make a forger’s life easy.
“All handwriting, not just cursive, is individual — just as all handwriting involves fine motor skills. That is why any first-grade teacher can immediately identify (from the print-writing on unsigned work) which of 25 or 30 students produced it. Mandating cursive to preserve handwriting resembles mandating stovepipe hats and crinolines to preserve the art of tailoring.”
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Readers are invited to submit comments and questions about this and other educational issues. The e-mail address for First Teachers is fitzpatrijames@sbcglobal.net, and the mailing address is P.O. Box 15, Wallingford, CT 06492.
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