New Jersey has officially reintroduced the teaching of schooling in elementary schools. The law, signed on Monday by Philip D. Murphy on his last day as governor, makes it mandatory for all third, fourth and fifth grade students to learn how to write in lanes from next school year. The measure comes into force immediately, and it is not the first state to try to reintroduce the aisle to school: about two dozen other American states have already done so.
For over a decade, in American schools, there has been a gradual abandonment of teaching in school programs. In 2010, in fact, the course was excluded from the Common Core Standards, the federal guidelines for education from the school of childhood to high school, leaving the states wide discretion. Since then, the spread of computers, tablets and keyboards had made manual writing less and less central in daily teaching.
The advocates of the law recall above all studies that link handwriting to better storing information and to greater speed in text production. Murphy pointed out that the course allows students to read historical documents in their original form, such as the United States Constitution, as well as maintain practical skills such as signing or compiling checks.
According to the New Jersey Education Commissioner, Kevin Dehmer, the goal is not only to preserve a tradition, but to strengthen basic skills related to fine motor development, literacy and student safety. The norm, he explained, will apply to all public schools of the state already from the next full school year.
But not everyone is convinced of the usefulness of the obligation. Morgan Polikoff, professor of educational policies at the University of Southern California, noted that many studies cited in favor of manual writing do not distinguish specifically between teaching and writing in the press. According to Polikoff, the return of the ailing is more a cultural nostalgia than a teaching need, a transversal phenomenon that unites politically very different states like Arkansas and California.
A similar reading also comes from the historical Tamara Plakins Thornton, former professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo, who studied the cultural role of writing in the United States. According to Thornton, the lane has been technically over a century, but tends to re-emerge in moments of social change as a symbol of return to the past. Despite criticism, the new law already finds supporters among students and families: In New Jersey there are national calligraphy competitions, such as those promoted by the educational publisher Zaner-Bloser, which continue to attract the interest of even younger generations.
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