Schools in Finland are to phase out the teaching of joined-up handwriting, “on the grounds that being nifty at a keyboard is more important” in the modern age.

“This is desperately short-sighted. Touch-typing is certainly a skill that should be taught to all children, but that’s no reason to abandon cursive handwriting. It’s like giving up walking because you have learned to drive. Handwriting is the face of a person out of sight, as distinctive as their gait. It offers a window to our emotions: only with a pen can you write a love note or letter of condolence that looks as though it came from the heart.  “Few of us get to wield a paintbrush or charcoal daily, to make a mark that is completely original to us.” Let’s hope the Finns reconsider, and that no other country follows their lead”.   (Claudia Pritchard,  The Independent on Sunday, edited)

Handwriting offers not just a window into our emotions but is a clue to the educational level and background of the writer.  Useful for employers, aside from anything else.  You can make grammatical and spelling mistakes on a computer or cellphone, but these can be put down to hurried carelessness.  To write something by hand and get it wrong somehow has more impact. It’s nice, for instance, to receive a “thank you”, but a handwritten one is more personal because it takes more effort.   I can see that it is easier for teachers to teach a class touch- typing than laboriously teaching cursive writing, but this is no reason to blandify and homogenize everything. And,  by the way, things typed electronically can be hacked, are effectively public and can be copied and used against you.  The personal touch, the personal connection between human beings is in any case a big part of Epicureanism.   Let us protect this instance of it.