Handwriting is confirmed by studies to impact areas earlier believed unaffected
The international scientific community had long assumed, then proved by experiments, the fundamental impact handwriting has on the brain, fine motor skills, memory integration – in short, on people and our societies. Nearly ten years ago, a small country attempted to introduce full digitalization but they quickly changed their mind and with good reason.
It received worldwide news coverage when the Finnish Ministry of Education decided to phase out cursive handwriting classes in primary schools in 2016. They made this decision despite studies from as early as 2013 confirming that children who replaced handwriting with digital platforms and keyboards very quickly showed signs of a decline in the development of their logical skills. In addition, the act of pushing controllers fails to sufficiently aid the development of fine motor movements.
In fact, conclusive studies were published even before that date, which claimed that handwriting had a very prominent role in a child’s development and learning process. In one of these, an American scientist, Louise Spear-Swerling showed back in 2006 that handwriting classes are an essential tool in the management of different learning difficulties, reading problems, non-verbal learning difficulties and hyperactivity. Research studies confirmed that the discontinuation of the teaching of handwriting directly reduces the brain’s logical and learning abilities.
Despite the apparent risks, the leaders of the digitally highly developed Nordic country argued that computers, keyboards and touchscreens are the future. Another argument was that due to the similarity of characters in Finnish joined-up writing, it was challenging to learn it and that the use of keyboards helps quicken thinking.
Well, this turned out to be extremely wrong and was completely revoked in the following school year.
This story offered a number of benefits both for Finnish children and the international scientific community: the first is that Finland's education officials recognised their mistake extremely quickly and remedied it directly in the following school year instead of moving forward with their wrong decision. Also, the scientific community was given access to an extensive “experiment”, from basically a closed laboratory, with specific results, and fortunately, with non-irreversible consequences.
For scientists, this latter was the greater benefit. This year, researchers studying the area practically flooded Finland and added numerous valuable research results to the world’s science knowledge base.
Few are aware that one of the most comprehensive analyses of the relationship between handwriting and digitalisation is connected to Hungary, or more precisely, Etelburg. Gábor Megyeri, former designer for Montegrappa and Montblanc as well as founder and designer of the Etelburg brand wrote a very extensive doctoral dissertation about this topic, titled Digital Past, Analogue Futures. The next few issues will explore the most interesting parts of this inspiring paper.
Of the many various approaches and results, including in the fields of communication science, social science and marketing science etc., the author finds the medical aspects the most shocking, in other words, the degree of impact handwriting has on logical abilities, fine motor movement, memory development and integration, just to highlight the most important ones.
This is why Gábor Megyeri thinks that it is his responsibility or even mission to raise public awareness about all of this. He says that despite the incredible amount of scientific results collected in past decades, the general public mostly remains uninformed; we are not aware of what a wonderful innovation handwriting is and there are still many people thinking that pens may be replaced with keyboards.
“Handwriting is a tremendously complex thing. It is such a basic skill that we fail to think about what actually happens when an idea is formed in the brain, a command is given, a process is launched in the brain and we write this down on a piece of paper with a pen. The way neural pathways work, the physiological processes involved are all incredibly fascinating.” - Gábor Megyeri explains.
Selected literature
Gábor Megyeri: Digital Past, Analog Futures
Doctoral Dissertation, Corvinus University of Budapest
Doctoral School of Business and Management, Budapest, 2023
Planton, S., Jucla, M., Roux, F. E., & Démonet, J. F. (2013). The “handwriting brain”: a meta-analysis of neuroimaging studies of motor versus orthographic processes. Cortex, 49(10), 2772-2787. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2013.05.011
Signing off: Finnish schools phase out handwriting classes.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/31/finnish-schools-phase-out-handwriting-classes-keyboard-skills-finland (access date: 23/02/2025)
Spear-Swerling, L. (2006). Children’s reading comprehension and oral reading fluency in easy text. Reading and Writing, 19(2), 199-220.