Why We Must Teach Handwriting to Our Children
Maria Konnikova for The New York Times:
Children not only learn to read more quickly when they first learn to write by hand, but they also remain better able to generate ideas and retain information. In other words, it’s not just what we write that matters — but how.
“When we write, a unique neural circuit is automatically activated,” said Stanislas Dehaene, a psychologist at the Collège de France in Paris. “There is a core recognition of the gesture in the written word, a sort of recognition by mental simulation in your brain.
So much educational focus is on typing, which is important, but kids need to learn how to draw letters and transcribe on paper. It’s not a matter of one technology outperforming the other, it’s about brain development.
