Yes / No / Not Given: the writer's views

In many classrooms, the pen is quietly losing ground. Pupils who once filled exercise books now type their homework, take tests on tablets and, increasingly, dictate their ideas to software that turns speech into text. Several education systems have reduced the time given to handwriting in the primary curriculum, and in some places joined-up, or cursive, writing is no longer taught at all. To many people this seems a natural development. Schools no longer teach children to use a slide rule, they point out, so why insist that they master a skill that most adults rarely use for anything longer than a shopping list?

The question deserves a better answer than either side usually gives it. Technology enthusiasts tend to present handwriting as a relic, a piece of nostalgia that wastes precious teaching hours. Its defenders, on the other hand, sometimes speak as if the loss of joined-up writing were a threat to civilisation itself. Neither position, in my view, survives contact with the evidence, which is both more interesting and more modest than the slogans on either side suggest.

The strongest case for handwriting concerns young children. Occupational therapists, who work with pupils who find writing difficult, point out that forming letters by hand demands close coordination of eye, hand and memory. Several studies have found that young children who practise writing letters by hand later recognise them more readily than children who learn them only by typing, and letter recognition is one of the foundations of learning to read. Admittedly, most of these studies are small, and few have followed children for more than a few months. But their findings point consistently in the same direction, which is more than can be said for a great deal of educational research.

The evidence for older students is far less clear. A widely reported experiment found that university students who took lecture notes by hand answered conceptual questions better than those who typed on laptops, apparently because slower writing forced them to summarise rather than copy the lecturer's words. The study was enthusiastically taken up by lecturers who wanted to ban laptops from their classes. Later attempts to reproduce the result, however, have found weaker and less consistent effects, and it now seems likely that what matters is not the tool but the way it is used. A student who types a thoughtful summary will probably learn more than one who copies every slide in beautiful handwriting.

What, then, should schools do? Some education technology companies argue that keyboard skills should replace handwriting from the first year of school, since that is how children will write as adults. This seems to me to mistake the purpose of early education, which is not only to teach the tools of adult life but to build the abilities on which later learning depends. Equally, I see little justification for the hours some schools still spend perfecting the loops of joined-up script, a style whose main advantage, speed, matters far less now that most extended writing is done on a keyboard. Clear, fluent printing serves a young child perfectly well.

A sensible policy would therefore teach letter formation carefully in the first years of school, introduce typing once children can write by hand with reasonable ease, and stop treating the two as rivals. Some primary teachers report that pupils who type almost everything find it harder to plan a piece of writing on paper, which matters in countries where important examinations are still handwritten. The real risk is not that handwriting will disappear, but that decisions about it will be made on the basis of nostalgia or novelty rather than evidence.