A Republican Victory

Handwriting is becoming a lost art, according to today's Washington Post. Schools don't teach much penmanship these days amid the demands for other, seemingly more relevant skills and standardized test requirements.

Many educators shrug. Stacked up against teaching technology, foreign languages and the material on standardized tests, penmanship instruction seems a relic, teachers across the region say. But academics who specialize in writing acquisition argue that it's important cognitively, pointing to research that shows children without proficient handwriting skills produce simpler, shorter compositions, from the earliest grades.

[...]

In one...stud[y], Vanderbilt University professor Steve Graham, who studies the acquisition of writing, experimented with a group of first-graders in Prince George's County who could write only 10 to 12 letters per minute. The kids were given 15 minutes of handwriting instruction three times a week. After nine weeks, they had doubled their writing speed and their expressed thoughts were more complex. He also found corresponding increases in their sentence construction skills.

So...if handwriting is related to complex thinking and more and more children are growing up without learning how to write cursively, they will be the ideal Republican voters.

No thinking required in that Brave New World.