Italic handwriting update
Portland State University Press is now gone, but you can still get the italic instructional series that they published. This information is thanks to Kate Gladstone of Handwriting Repair. She also notes:
You may or may not know that, since Obama came into office, the Department of Education has quietly re-opened the question of whether the United States should establish a national curriculum with standards for *all* subject areas ("all" would seem likely to include handwriting). In fact, the newest TIME Magazine (April 27, 2009) has an article urging a national curriculum (p. 32, by one Walter Isaacson who apparently has some influence in such matters).
If this should happen, I would far rather see the national standards mandate (or at least encourage or explicitly permit) the teaching of Italic handwriting than to risk seeing the issue of handwriting ignored (or, worse, to see a national standard which mandated a conventional print-then-cursive program with all its accident-prone tendencies, including but not limited to its habit of falling apart at any speed above a snail’s crawl).
Could Obama outlaw the teaching of Italic in schools? Some handwriting lobbyists are trying to push the White House in that direction.
At present, 7% of USA schools teach Italic — accounting for at least 400,000 children in the USA. This figure does not include the 3 million homeschooling kids out there: about 1/3 of whom learn Italic.
As you know, the Italic style of handwriting accounts for only a very few of the handwriting programs published in North America. The United States, for instance, has over 200 published handwriting programs … and the publishers of one of them (a non-Italic program called “Handwriting without Tears”) are trying to have the White House make it impossible to use the other 199.
Specifically:
The founders and marketers of “Handwriting Without Tears” (hwtears.com)–
in my professional observation and experience, one of the worst
programs ever created
(see model-samples at http://www.hwtears.com/files/HWT_Alphabet.pdf ) –
are now aggressively lobbying the White House to make every detail of their own
particular instructional method and writing styles required (with no
exceptions) in all schools under USA law. They are piggybacking this onto the current White House efforts to create and impose a detailed national curriculum for USA schools (which I referred to earlier, in the correspondence that you quote in the message that I’m commenting on).
The director of HWTears (Dr. Jan Olsen — her doctorate is in Education) announced this publicly 7 years ago (that her firm would be doing this),
at an event where I was present. (It’s a long story.)
Thereafter I tried to warn others, but almost nobody thought she meant it.
Specifics:
HWTears has created, and is fully funding and operating, an
innocuous-sounding Washington lobby-group called “Handwriting
Standards” at http://www.handwritingstandards.com
(note the teeny-tiny copyright notice at the bottom of the page, to
see which handwriting program owns that lobby-group!)
The lobbyists’ web-site is designed to sound neutral on the surface,
but if you dig deeper and actually read their proposed standards,
these are verbatim quotes of particular details of the HWTears
teaching sequence and even stylistic features
and they are very closely tied in with the HWTears.com web-site’s own
descriptions of the same endeavor –
to the point that, if the “Handwriting Standards” lobbyists succeed,
no other program but HWTears will conform with the details of teaching
method/style that their lobbyists are trying to have written into law.
In other words: the proposed national standards for school handwriting
are very closely tied in with HWTears program sequence, to the point
that they are basically a step-by-step, practically verbatim summary
of that program’s sequence/curriculum/practices and of no other.
This is clear if you are familiar, as I am, with the HWTears program
materials/lesson plans/teacher-training sessions and if you read the
lobby’s proposed “Handwriting Standards” for yourself in the
level-by-level blue links at
http://www.handwritingstandards.com/handwriting-standards and then the
full document at
http://www.handwritingstandards.com/sites/default/files/Standards-20k-4_FINAL.pdf
.
Of special note:
adopting those standards would make Italic illegal
in all schools throughout the USA.
Although the word “italic” is nowhere mentioned in the standards,
things required by the standards would prevent Italic from being used,
because of the standards’ stylistic requirements for loops, for
particular types of curves, and so on (note particularly the contents
of the standards for Grade Three and beyond: “Pre-Cursive and Cursive”
skills in the PDF and at the above-referened blue links.)
Many of the people receiving this letter (and — I hope — passing it
on to others of like mind)
use Italic, teach Italic, and have seen (with their students) that Italic is a far better approach than the one proposed (the one which alone would be permissible if the lobbyists have their way).
Others interested in handwriting (whether they write Italic or not) will have other concerns — at least, about the ethics of organizing such a campaign and pretending neutrality.
If you care even a little bit about this, e-mail me at
handwritingrepair@gmail.com (subject-line should include the words
“Italic handwriting”) and/or phone me at 518-482-6763 to decide what
we must do, and how. We must act now if we can. (If the lobby gets far enough to propose a bill, it will be more difficult — but necessary — to act further at that time in order to prevent the bill from becoming a law.)
Kate Gladstone
6 August 2010 at 9:04 am