Handwriting practice, mimesis, and Dow's /Composition/

A mainstay of elementary school: handwriting practice sheets, first for printing and then for cursive. The wonderful thing about handwriting practice is that it is excellent proof of childrens' fine motor control. Adults tend to "forgive" the inadequancies that are obvious in picture-making endeavours of children, and condescend to those efforts; but it is easy to imagine a society with different incentives - say, one with a hieroglyphic alphabet, or one where diagram-drawing or sketching were considered a universally necessary skills for adults - would find fault with the teacher who could not teach drawing to young minds that are obviously physically and mentally capable.

It is especially interesting that the natural protestion that might arise in response to such an assertion is that creativity cannot be taught. Implicitly, the Western (and anglophone) world assumes firstly that drawing is somehow an inherently creative activity, and secondly that teaching and education are somehow disjoint from creativity alogether.

For the first assumption, we have as a weonderful counterexample a video titled Austin's Butterfly: a skill we do not teach, one of observation, or iterative creation, if you will, is made clear by allowing students to cultivate their powers of observation themselves.

For the second assumption, we may turn to the introduction of Arthur Dow's Composition cite:dowCompositionSeriesExercises1997. Dow discusses the division of the project of art into mimesis and design, and how art education, critique, and theory have all, in the West, been placed squarely in the locus of the former. His commentary restricts itself to fine arts education, but is easily seen to be more broadly applicable, across the theory and instruction of the humanities.

Good drawing results from trained judgment, not from the making of fac-similes or maps. Train the judgment, and ability to draw grows naturally. Schools that follow the imitative or academic way regard drawing as a preparation for design, whereas the very opposite is the logical order—design a preparation for drawing. Soon after the time of Leonardo da Vinci art education was classified into Representative (imitative), and Decorative, with separate schools for each—a serious mistake which has resulted in loss of public appreciation. Painting, which is essentially a rhythmic harmony of colored spaces, became sculptural, an imitation of modelling. Decoration became trivial, a lifeless copying of styles. The true relation between design and representation was lost. This error is long-lived. An infinite amount of time is wasted in misdirected effort because tradition has a strong hold, and because artists who have never made a study of education keep to old ruts when they teach. This academic system of art-study ignores fundamental structure, hence the young pupil understands but few phases of art. Confronted with a Japanese ink painting, a fresco by Giotto or a Gothic statue he is unable to recognize their art value. Indeed he may prefer modern clever nature-imitation to imaginative work of any period.

We can derive commentary in the same line of distinction from much further afield: the series of posts titled Babble and Prune cite:MoreBabbleLessWrong draw from the architecture of natural language generaators to offer commentary on the analogous processes in human minds.

I would propose an embellishment of the figure of Satan as the nihilistic intellectual: Satan as the critic. One of the (many) disturbing things I have noticed about my high school curriculum is that English classes are factories for creating critics out of artists. At least in my experience, we wrote short stories, poems, and other free form essays in elementary and middle school, but turned exclusively to the analytical essay by the time high school rolled around.

How frightening is that? Take a generation of teenagers, present them with the greatest literature of our civilization. Then, instead of teaching them to do the obvious thing – imitate – we teach them to analyze – the derivative work of a critic. The work of Satan: the intellectual whose ability to criticize far exceeds his ability to create. And so we find that the best students to come out of our high schools are created in the image of Satan. For every one budding novelist, we have a dozen teenage journalists, lawyers, and activists.

Satan is the voice in your ear who says, “You will never do this well enough for it to be worth doing.” This is the burrowing anxiety that puts me off writing for weeks at at time, the anxiety that anything I produce will not justify its own existence. The subroutine in your head constantly constructing impossibly high standards and handing them to you to use as excuses to do nothing. Satan is characterized by inaction, the inaction caused by paralyzing perfectionism.

The consequences of this deliberate limitation of pedagogical concerns on the part of secondary educators are borne out in the observed skills of young college students cite:universityWhyAreStudents.

During their high school careers, most of our students were not writing with the frequency we might expect, nor were they doing the types of writing that we will require of them in their college years. In a study at George Washington University (2007), first-year undergraduates reported that the most frequently assigned high school writing tasks required them to offer and support opinions, with a secondary emphasis on summarizing and synthesizing information. Students were rarely required to criticize an argument, define a problem and propose a solution, shape their writing to meet their readers’ needs, or revise based on feedback. Furthermore, according to a survey conducted by The Chronicle of Higher Education (2006), 61% of high school teachers said their students have never written a paper that was more than five pages. As a result, students have not had enough practice to develop a set of sophisticated writing skills.

How self directed is handwriting practice?

A given worksheet is a drill: a canonical form to repeat and perfect. But neither is the pace of engagement self-directed, nor is the downstream usage as required by the curriculum. General assignments that one is expected to complete using that handwriting may have a field in a rubric that grades Presentation, which includes the consideration of one's handwriting; but its consideration is at cross purposes with the ostensible purpose of having written the assignment in question. Rather than offering a path to a more cohesive understanding of the desired skill and its importance, losing marks for bad handwriting on an otherwise unrelated assigment - the content of which one might have worked wuite hard on - is merely dispiriting.

The salient distinction here is between coordination and cohesion - where a cohesive task reinforces one's understanding of the skills needed to perform it - and therefore can be productively pursued independently - a task requiring coordination merely imposes a burden of executive function on a student, and will therefore demand closer supervision. It is the difference between logical impicature and logical conjunction.

Of course, as one ages, demands on both capacities will increase exponentially; and so will the expectation that one can self-direct one's way through meeting these demands. This is as expected: Learning How to Learn cite:LearningHowLearn explains the concept of chunking, i.e. the fractal nature of knowledge and it can be seen how progressive overload runs in parallel to the trajectory of a successful student.

The problems arise, of course, when a student fails to perform to expectations in either direction. Learning, too, as a skill; and if poorly taught, will not be learned. Those students who do not, by virtue of ahppenstance, move at precisely the pace of instruction, will find their learning trajectories diverging rapidly from instruction; and eventually understand that what purports to be the manner in which school ought to work has little to nothing to do with its de facto nature.