He struggles with reading. He butchers spelling words. And his handwriting used to be an illegible scrawl. But Robert Hughes is the envy of his Grade 5 classmates.
While they sit at their desks at Ecole Gron Morgan in Thunder Bay with pens in hand, crafting sentences about ancient civilizations, Robert uses a sleek new laptop computer -- complete with spell-checker, Internet hook-up and software that dictates his voice into words on the screen -- for all his writing assignments. The only time he actually has to pick up a pencil is during math class.
Not that his classmates envy his mild learning disability -- his tortures with spelling and the clumsy chicken-scratch handwriting that trails off the page -- that has made the laptop a last resort for a boy who was losing ground in the classroom. But for children raised in a high-tech age of computers and cellphones and hand-held e-mail devices, ordinary pencils and paper seem painfully outdated.
"You talk into it and it writes," Robert says with wonder. "I've been practising at school because it needs to learn my voice. For my project today, I wrote, 'At the Toronto Zoo, there are endangered species like the Arctic fox and the white tiger.' I had to type a bit."
Both his teacher and his parents are certain that keyboard skills will be more important to Robert's academic prospects than handwriting. "For him, the laptop has definitely been the right solution," says his mother, Michelle Hughes, an information technology analyst with a cellphone and BlackBerry at the ready. "He has the opportunity now to keep up and maybe catch up in areas where he has fallen behind."
But Robert's is hardly an isolated case. An entire generation of Canadian students now spends more time at a computer and less time pushing a pencil -- and handwriting instruction is taking a backseat to keyboarding.
In an age when e-mail is replacing ink-stained letters and pocket-sized BlackBerries have turned address books into relics, handwriting is becoming a lost art.
And nowhere is this more obvious than in the schools, where few teachers still bother to teach their primary-grade pupils the prim printed letters or the evenly slanted cursive writing that was graded like math and reading scores in days gone by.
"It's really a very important area that got overlooked because of the computer age, and that's very unfortunate" says Marvin Simner, a psychologist at the University of Western Ontario and an expert in handwriting and kindergarten education.
"If they dismiss handwriting instruction in order to teach keyboarding, they're doing a disservice to children. Obviously you have to teach keyboarding skills because this is part of what our environment consists of. But the issue is, should you sacrifice handwriting for the sake of teaching computer skills? And I say, 'No.' I think that's very shortsighted."
To prove the point, Prof. Simner conducted a research study a few years ago in which he compared the writing of pupils in public elementary schools in London, Ont., with that of children enrolled in private Dutch Reform schools, where handwriting and the distinct flourishes of the European-style script are still taught.
Not only was the private-school writing more legible and artfully crafted, students could write faster, producing a full sentence more than a minute faster than their public-school counterparts.
"This gets to be very important," Prof. Simner says. "Obviously, if handwriting is slower and you're taking notes, you're not copying down everything that's important. Children who are struggling with handwriting and are slower tend to forget what they want to say because their thoughts are fleeting. And that affects their grades."
Even with the advent of wafer-thin computers and hand-held electronic gadgets, he does not foretell the end of handwriting as Canadian society knows it.
