The Independent Review
Monday 23rd September 2002
Travelling to Brittany on the train the other day, I sat next to a university
teacher who was marking students' essays on the American Constitution. Peeping
at scripts, 1 noticed that the students had written the same thing (French
universities not prize originality) and that they all had a similar, ornate but
legible style of handwriting.
Too ornate and not similar, or legible enough, apparently. For the first time
in half a century, the French education ministry intends to suggest a standard
model of handwriting to every primary school and kindergarten in the country.
From the new year, teachers will be recommended to instruct pupil to form, and
join, their letters according to a new, simpler style, circulated by the
ministry.
This goes against the trend. The days are long gone when the French education
minister could look at his watch in Paris and tell you what every nine old in
France was learning. Successive education ministers have been trying, often
against the opposition of teaching unions, to encourage local initiative and
creativity.
Why, then, suggest a uniform of ecriture? The last education minister, Jack
Lang - the man who gave us the Louvre pyramid, when he was culture minister in
the 1980s - thought that it was time that France had a clearer, more
businesslike handwriting for the 21st century.
He organised a national competition. The new, approved style has been created
from a merger of the two winning entries. Both are neat, spare, elegant scripts,
which abandon the fantastic arabesques and curlicues - especially on capital
letters - that French children have been taught to use for decades.
Another peculiarity of French schools is that children do not learn to
lower-case letters individually. They start with block capitals and then go
straight to ecriture attachee, or joined up writing. Our youngest child, Grace
aged four, is starting the last year of kindergarten, and proudly learning to
write her full name in attachee, with all the traditional flourishes. She will
be among the last generation of children in France to write her capital Cs, Gs
and Fs with flying dragon's tails and enough curly bits to make a salade mixte.
This may seem a shame. Another French tradition is going the way of yellow
car headlights and rude waiters.
However; the neat essays that I saw on the TGV are apparently not typical of
the consequences of teaching baroque handwriting styles. Written at speed - for
an exam or lecture notes - the dragons tails can end up tangled in an illegible
jumble. It is now depressingly common for French children from deprived
backgrounds to reach secondary school barely able to write at all.
The joint-winner of the French national model handwriting competition was a
woman called Marion Andrews. Ah, I thought, here is a good story. Even though my
own handwriting resembles the death throes of an ink-covered caterpillar, we
clever British are teaching the French how to write.
I rang up Ms Andrews. She turned out to be a Belgian married to a Welshman,
who was himself born in exile in Slough. They used to live in the Netherlands.
They now live half the time in Belgium and half in the Jura, in eastern France.
(They deserve a special award from the European Union.)
Ms Andrews, 50, an internationally renowned calligrapher; says that the
sample she submitted was based on her own handwriting, which she has copied in
turn from one of the unadorned handwriting styles of the Renaissance. Although
500 years old, it is a script that adapts well to the writing tools of today,
felt-tip and ballpoints.
It should, she says, be learned letter by letter. Contrary to French
tradition Ms Andrews insists that it is much better for children to learn the
individual shapes of letters before they learn how to join them together.
In the age of keystrokes, e-mails, text messages and laptops,
is good handwriting worth fighting for? "Yes," said Ms Andrews, with
polite indignation. "First, because you don't always have a computer with
you. Second, because handwriting has a soul. It can express, not just the
opinions of the writer, but their mood and their personality. No computer
printout can do that."
          
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