Reb:As I said, the purpose of this show is to discuss the importance or the lack of importance of handwriting in education and the world of work...



Dr. Ed: I think it's unquestionable that the advent of tape recorders, voice recognition software, and PDAs have pretty much made the necessity of forcing young hands to contort into cramped claws to practice their letters an old and useless one.



Erm: I think it's reprehensible that we don't teach them Morse code anymore.



Sr. Par: Handwriting is an important part of hand/eye coordination, which comes in handy in sports, technical jobs, tying one's shoelaces, and cooking. Good handwriting is essential to pleasing the discerning employer and it is very very useful in situations in which the computer is down.



Plew: Did someone say we were going to get fed?



Dr. Ed: I almost never use handwriting except for scrawling my signature across the bottoms of laser-printed documents. And I don't see why I have to do that, even. Isn't it obvious where the document came from? And why do we have to print it out, anyway? Why can't we just post it on our website and let anyone who needs to see it access it?



Erm: And what about shorthand? Whatever happened to that? Speed, efficiency, communication!



Sr. Par: Yes, note-taking! That is very important. The ability to take things down and still be able to read them later! Very very important for when the batteries are gone on your toys!



Plew: I don't see any food. Where's the tea cart?



Dr. Ed: Note-taking? Why? Why not just hand out the syllabus and the lectures on disk or data sticks? Why make the kiddies work so hard while you sit on your butt? Why waste chalk on a board or your breath on a lecture? Just cut to the chase and get it over with!



Sr. Par: So, you don't think children should learn to pay attention?



Dr. Ed: To what? They look at the disks, read what they need, learn what they have to, take the test and move on with their education. I mean, if they weren't capable of paying attention, they wouldn't be at school in the first place!



Plew: That's not necessarily true, now, is it? In a compulsory school system where class size is determined by the fecundity of the local populace rather than government or administration choice, and the tax monies remain rather static while teacher's demands for benefits and pay increases are incremental to their union's lawyer's imaginations, the student is at the mercy of minds that are not on education but on getting through the day to attend another meeting about how they should demand smaller classes and shorter hours. Teaching handwriting is time intensive, requires a series of judgements about quality, ability and intent, and it demands a certain artistic sensibility from the instructor, who, in many cases is only pretending to teach because they owe on their college fees and the football career fell through. It would also demand that the instructors have good handwriting themselves and since modern colleges are more about processing students as product than about actually making sure the product works as advertized, the basic skills necessary to actually be a useful person to yourself and others are avoided because if the schools start turning out useful people, then they might turn around and become members of the board at the college or school and demand that everyone be capable of functioning to their fullest extent instead of slacking off and showing their pupils the movie versions of famous novels and plays. 'S'cuse me, I've got to go to the bog.