Handwriting: Is the art disappearing?

The main explanation that many people give for this is that computers, and of recent, handsets, are responsible for the increasingly illegible scrawls. However, Seth Nuhu, the Chief Guardian Counsellor of Local Education Authority, Abuja Municipal Area Council, says pupils do not write beautifully again because government pays less emphasis on the teaching of handwriting […]

The main explanation that many people give for this is that computers, and of recent, handsets, are responsible for the increasingly illegible scrawls. However, Seth Nuhu, the Chief Guardian Counsellor of Local Education Authority, Abuja Municipal Area Council, says pupils do not write beautifully again because government pays less emphasis on the teaching of handwriting in schools.

“Right from the period when the Universal Basic Education (UBE) was introduced,” says Nuhu, “government does not provide adequate instructional materials for the teaching of handwriting like other subjects. And since teachers have no materials, there is no way they can teach the pupils.”

But despite the inadequacy in the provision of materials to teach it, schools still spare time to teach handwriting as a subject. In some schools that Weekly Trust visited, handwriting is taught for 35 minutes over two days. The revelation here while going through the pupils books is that even though they are taught the art, each child’s handwriting is different.

Nuhu says the reason for this is that there is no particular handwriting pattern for its teaching in the primary school curriculum. This, he says, has made handwriting different between schools as different teachers tend to teach it in their own way.

“In the primary school curriculum, there is no particular handwriting pattern,” says Nuhu. “If you look at the books used in schools, you can only see examples. There are no teaching modules – should the letters be slanting, straight or what? A particular pattern is not specified. So the teachers too do not know which way they should teach it.”

Since the curriculum does not specify the pattern of teaching the subject, it is assumed that teachers could use the skills they acquired during their school days to teach. Seth said the present crop of teachers cannot teach the subject effectively “since many of them could also not grab the skill during their own days in school.”  

 Mr Onu Nicos Nda, an educationist, said inadequate materials could be the contributing factor to what is becoming the dearth of handwriting. He said that kids do not learn to write neatly because no one has forced them to.

“During our days in school, we could learn how to write a particular word for more than a week. We’d continue to learn until everybody gets it right. Also, at that time, good handwriting carried a mark. But nowadays, immediately pupils get to Primary 3, teachers begin to concentrate on the correctness of the answers given by them and awarding no special mark for good handwriting,” he said.

Mohammed Baba, a teacher with UBE, said the number of periods allocated to the teaching of handwriting in primary schools is the major factor responsible for the dearth of the art.

“There is no magic we can do to make a pupil develop good handwriting when the period allocated to teach the subject is small compared to other subjects. It takes pupils a long time to have a grasp of subjects like mathematics that is taught every day, not to think of handwriting that is taught once or twice a week,” he said.

Baba, who teaches junior secondary class, said because less emphasis is paid to letter-writing competitions in school, the teachers have also lost interest in teaching the subject. “Before, there used to be writing competitions. But today, competitions are in other subjects like mathematics and science,” he said.

However, if the art of handwriting is dying, should it be a thing of concern to us as the most relevant thing is that people still somehow write, even if what they put on paper is not beautiful-looking. Mr Nda answered: “We have to encourage handwriting because it enables pupils to appreciate beauty at a younger age.  If they appreciate beauty in handwriting, they will be able to appreciate beauty in things of nature.”

 “Writing is the first stage of learning,” he said. “Pupils learn spellings and composition by writing…and the first thing every child I’ve ever met has wanted to learn is to write their names.”

Nuhu says handwriting is basically a form of self-discipline for the child, a quality to be imbibed early in life. “Through handwriting, a child starts to learn that things are done in the society based on rules. From there, the child could graduate to know other rules that govern other things in other subjects,” he said.

“Handwriting also develops a child’s cognitive ability,” Nuhu added. “A child tends to remember the alphabets and how they are written in beautiful ways to form words and sentences.”

Although the young generation may continue with their sloppy scrawl on paper to construct beautiful sentences, they’ll continue to struggle to make their manuscripts beautiful. And with the proliferation of computers, they may not have the luck to write the cursive missives of generations before them.