cannot sing, cannot dance, cannot write joined-up
children aren’t being taught handwriting in Finland. it’s coming here next. We’re losing our humanity
31 Jul 2015
The poor little kids of Finland are not to study joined-up writing. To me that is like hearing that they will not be allowed handkerchiefs or the usage of knives and forks. And what happens in Lappeenranta or Äänekoski will without a doubt come to cross prior to lengthy in Letchworth and Angmering. Didn’t we all begin the usage of duvets and dumping blankets? soon we’ll have misplaced our handwriting.
Already, children go tippety-faucet, tippety-tap on their keyboards, like so many wooden hens and chickens pecking in one of those momentarily fascinating toys shaped like a table-tennis bat with a ball swinging beneath. Then the youngsters send their cut-and-pasted homework to their hardworking teachers through electronic mail, until it is eaten via some e-canine.
What happens, though, if a growing kid desires to write a letter? smartly, he doesn’t. i do know that. He’ll ship an electronic mail instead. but if he did wish to, he’d must trace the sticks and balls of the letters on the envelope, most likely keeping the pen (ballpoint) like a dagger. that is itself ironical, on the grounds that youngsters frequently dangle knives like pens. not just children both. I saw a Cambridge don using his cutlery like that in a common room supposedly chocked with the best possible culture.
Anyway, does it topic that we’ll have to use a keyboard to put in writing, any longer than a pianist must, relatively than plucking strings together with his fingers? in spite of everything, P G Wodehouse banged out all his beautifully crafted prose on a typewriter. And Lucian Freud, for instance, who had a good idea what he wanted things to look like, wrote a type of uneven print that would have shamed Molesworth.
i think it does subject very much indeed – not in a lifestyles or demise means, however in the same way that it issues whether or not we go on sporting clothes of wool or linen, singing instead of playing electronic music, assembly folks for a drink, strolling in the open air, growing vegetation in due season, seeing individuals die. life is that you can think of with none of those, but with none of them it’s a skinny half of-existence.
the way that we, the remaining scribal generation, write has been most affected by way of Edward Johnston. He was once, with the aid of any other irony, the man who devised the sans-serif lettering on the London Underground, which is distinct, if now not, to me, particularly sexy. however he knew learn how to write with a pen. Eric Gill described first witnessing Johnston writing: “I had that thrill and tremble of the center that otherwise i can most effective needless to say having had when I first touched my wife’s body.”
yes, smartly, Gill was once something of a sex maniac, but he was once now not fallacious in detecting a powerful creative pressure in the act of writing (quite except for composing sentences of words). It was, however, a craft that Evelyn Waugh saw as analogous to the art of the writer, of fiction or historical past. His lifestyles was changed in 1919 by means of the tutoring of a person known as Francis Crease. “His gown was once the agricultural aesthetic of the length, gentle tweeds, cloaks, silk shirts,” he wrote. “lately he would be identified as an glaring homosexual. I consider he was once solely without sexual interests.” Be that as it should, Waugh transformed his writing under the tutelage of the shy, secretive Crease.
Then one day he borrowed the knife Crease used to chop quills, and broke it. Crease replied with exaggerated sorrow, declaring he would never be capable to write once more. And he didn’t.
I’m not certain what we’re imagined to make of the true-lifestyles myth of the scribe who couldn’t write as soon as his knife was once damaged. but the first ebook Waugh published used to be no longer his biographical sketch of Rossetti, however a collection of Creases’s designs. He changed into a author when his tutor’s ability was once broken.
All our penknives are broken now. quickly a pen shall be as so much use to us as a chess-set to a cat. a number of will preserve the artwork, just as just a few are actually potters and weavers and falconers. genuine, there exists a large hobby in what people call “fonts” – typefaces. but this can be a secondhand experience, as though fonts were to be collected like mushrooms. yet everyone has of their fingers the power to make their very personal constant letter-types.
not see you later from now, though, if a survivor of the generation of joined-up writers sends a letter, the recipient will find he can no extra learn it than he might a running courtroom hand from the 17th century. Like a chinese language calligraphic painting on silk, it would in all probability seem nice in a frame.
kids don’t seem to be being taught handwriting in Finland. it is coming right here subsequent. We’re dropping our humanity
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