German teachers campaign to simplify handwriting in schools By Helen Pidd 29 June

 Union calls for end to 'deadweight tradition' of joined-up script all primary school pupils are required to learn.

                                                                                           Photo: Alamy/Clynt Garnham Education

Under the current system, learning 'die Schreibschrift' is compulsory for all schoolchildren in Germany.

 It has long been a painful rite of passage for German schoolchildren – learning "die Schreibschrift", a fiddly form of joined-up handwriting all pupils are expected to have mastered by the time they leave primary school.

 But now, many German teachers have had enough, insisting it is a waste of time to force children to learn a cursive script when they have already learned to print letters at kindergarten. Furthermore, they say, the joined-up handwriting is often illegible.

 The national primary schoolteachers' union has started a campaign to abolish compulsory teaching of Schreibschrift. "It's completely unnecessary, a deadweight tradition," according to the union's deputy chairman, Ulrich Hecker.

 He wants other states to follow Hamburg's lead, which recently took the rather radical step of introducing a new, easier alphabet called "die Grundschrift" that can take children all the way from tracing their first letters as toddlers to full fluency in adulthood.

 It is an idea some German language scholars consider culturally traitorous.

 "Writing is a cultural technique used to quickly put down thoughts. Joined-up handwriting trains fine motor skills, develops [a sense for] aesthetics. An apparently easier script also simplifies thoughts. I would mourn the loss of a piece of our writing culture," Dr Hans Kaufmann, regional head of the Society for German Language in Hamburg, told Bild newspaper.

 Josef Kraus, president of the Deutscher Lehrerverband, the teaching union which represents 100,000 secondary school teachers, said that Grundschrift would be detrimental to both teachers and children.

 "The legibility will not improve, but rather noticeably worsen, because each pupil will join up the letters however they fancy. The speed of writing will also decrease," he told Bild.

 "In addition, printing letters is much more tiring for children because they have to lift the pen from the paper for each letter. From a pedagogical point of view, it is a bankrupt idea, the wrong path to go down. I very much hope that other states will not copy the Hamburg model."

 When they start school, most German children begin by getting to grips with holding a pencil and then printing individual letters. At the end of the first year or the beginning of the second, they are then introduced to the cursive script and its loopier letters, which join together in a prescribed fashion.

 "It means they have to learn two scripts one after another, which wastes time and interrupts the learning process," said Hecker. "With Grundschrift, they start with one script and stick with it. They are always going to develop their own handwriting anyway."

 "Grundschrift gives schools more time to help and support their children," said Hans Brügelmann, a professor of primary education and didactics at the University of Siegen.

 It does not, he said, signal "the downfall of the civilised world" but gave children the tools they needed to develop a "legible, fluent script" of their own.

 Whereas some countries – such as the UK and the USA – do not have a national script, Germany has long had its own style of handwriting, which has developed over the years. Before the second world war, Germans wrote in the highly decorative Sütterlin script, until it was deemed by Hitler to be too parochial and not befitting a world power. In 1941 he replaced it with a "Latin script", which he felt would be more international.

 After the war, some schoolchildren were still taught Sütterlin so that they could understand letters from their grandparents, but the art soon died out. In 1953, West German children began to be taught "lateinische Ausgangschrift", an ornate but more legible joined-up script, which roughly translates as "model Latin script". Over in East Germany, where they always liked to do things a little differently, the "Schulausgangsschrift" (model school script) was introduced, which looked a lot like its western rival but with fewer loops. When the two Germanies became one, the handwriting was also unified, and since 1993 the "Vereinfachte Ausgangsschrift" (easier model script) has been on the syllabus.

English writing

 England's national curriculum says children aged five and six should be taught to join when they write. But what counts as "join"? For some teachers, it means every letter; for others only certain letters need be.

 Gwen Dornan, of the National Handwriting Association, says that while children now see so much text generated by computers, joined-up writing is not an anachronism. "The upper junior and secondary age pupil unable to pick up a pen and write quickly and legibly on paper is still at a considerable disadvantage. Time is wasted writing slowly; there is frustration when the text cannot be easily read; and a loss of confidence is commonly the result."

 Anna Barnett, a child psychologist, says letter formation should become automatic for children. "The same is true for joining letters: the correct movement pathways need to be taught, so that joining becomes fluent and automatic. This will promote legibility and speed, which are crucial aspects of writing."

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