UtopiaSilver.com Repost:
Most American public schools have removed the requirement from their curriculum to learn to write in cursive. This is another of the many methods designed and used to dumb-down America's children. Public so-called "education" has all but destroyed any real and useful education in America.
Although there are still a few (usually) rural public schools that do an adequate job, public education is largely controlled by leftist state & local education boards and teachers unions that are more concerned with "socially engineering" America's children rather than in teaching them to read, write, and think critically and analytically.That is the primary reason that parents are increasingly opting for home schooling or private schools.
BUT, parents do not need the public school systems to teach their children to read and write cursive. Exercise your parental responsibility and enhance your children's thinking ability by teaching them cursive handwriting! -Ben Taylor (UtopiaSilver.com)
Repost from PsychologyToday.com
"Why Cursive Handwriting Is Good for Your Brain" by Christopher Bergland
As school-age children increasingly rely solely on digital devices for remote- and in-class learning, many K-12 school systems around the world are phasing out cursive handwriting and no longer mandate that kids learn how to write in longhand script. Relying solely on a keyboard to learn the alphabet and type out written words could be problematic; accumulating evidence suggests that not learning cursive handwriting may hinder the brain's optimum potential to learn and remember.
A new EEG-based study by researchers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) reaffirms the importance of "old-fashioned" cursive handwriting in the 21st-century's Computer Age. Even if students use digital pens and write by hand on an interactive computer screen, cursive handwriting helps the brain learn and remember better. These findings (Askvik, Van der Weel, & Van der Meer, 2020) were recently published in the peer-reviewed journal Frontiers in Psychology.
"Some schools in Norway have become completely digital and skip handwriting training altogether. Finnish schools are even more digitized than in Norway. Very few schools offer any handwriting training at all," Audrey van der Meer, a neuropsychology professor at NTNU, said in an October 1 news release. "Given the development of the last several years, we risk having one or more generations lose the ability to write by hand. Our research and that of others show that this would be a very unfortunate consequence of increased digital activity."
For this study, Van der Meer and colleagues used high-density EEG monitoring to study how the brain's electrical activity differed when a cohort of 12-year-old children and young adults were handwriting in cursive, typewriting on a keyboard, or drawing visually presented words using a digital pen on a touchscreen, or with traditional pencil and paper.
Data analysis showed that cursive handwriting primed the brain for learning by synchronizing brain waves in the theta rhythm range (4-7 Hz) and stimulating more electrical activity in the brain's parietal lobe and central regions. "Existing literature suggests that such oscillatory neuronal activity in these particular brain areas is important for memory and for the encoding of new information and, therefore, provides the brain with optimal conditions for learning," the authors explain.
The latest (2020) research on the brain benefits of cursive handwriting adds to a growing body of evidence and neuroscience-based research on the importance of learning to write by hand. Almost a decade ago, researchers (James & Engelhardt, 2012) used MRI neuroimaging to investigate the effects of handwriting on functional brain development in young children.
Karin James and Laura Engelhardt found that handwriting (but not typing or tracing letter shapes) activated a unique "reading circuit" in the brain. "These findings demonstrate that handwriting is important for the early recruitment in letter processing of brain regions known to underlie successful reading. Handwriting, therefore, may facilitate reading acquisition in young children," the authors noted.
To read the rest of this important article and order the book "The Athlete's Way" by Christopher Bergland, go to: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-athletes-way/202010/why-cursive-handwriting-is-good-your-brain
0 comments