I am writing about a glimpse I caught at the middle school where I am a school doctor.
I looked through the alphabet practice books for the new first graders, and I saw block letters only and no written letters.
I asked the teachers about it and they said, "That's the way it is now. "
We spent the entire month of April mastering it in a practice book called "Penmanship" in the 1960s.
Considering what happened after that, this whole month was not a waste at all.
In her new book新著, Kumiko Torikai says that to increase your vocabulary, it is not enough to just listen to what you hear, but it is better to learn by writing.
To learn by writing, you must use the written form.
Even now, children in good places should be learning the written form.
If they are intentionally not learning it, this is a gap-maintaining device.
The five basic sentence patterns have also been stopped in public education.
If we make children learn English from elementary school without any educational theory, they will only spend less time learning Japanese, and that is just what they want.
Like a treatment system for a chronic disease that seems to be curable but is not, English education that cannot be learned is probably a very similar interest structure.
It is well-known that the U.S. taught English to Filipinos in a way that deliberately prevented them from improving their English, in contrast to the Japanese language education that Japan provided in Taiwan.
Beautiful penmanship美しい筆記体 is an art form.
Incidentally, "penmanship" also existed in my mother's time.
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)