Using a pen helps us discover thought – but the writing"s on the wall | Andrew Brown

‘There’s no contact for handwriting in most jobs these days, any much more than there is any requirement for independent thought’ … Andrew Brown’s scrawl. Photograph: Andrew Brown

Swedish schools are thinking about no matter whether to abandon the educating of handwriting. They will continue to educate block capitals, but the subtleties of cursive writing will no longer be transmitted outside the elite. This would seem to me to lose a single of the most wonderful cognitive tools ever invented. Handwriting helps you feel. The physicality of it helps make the connected psychological processes clearer and more memorable.

This type of argument is quite wasted on educational bureaucrats, for whom the question is regardless of whether children can learn to variety more rapidly and a lot more clearly than they can write by hand. Right after all, there is no phone for handwriting in most jobs nowadays, any a lot more than there is any necessity for independent imagined.

I never consider there is any doubt that a educated typist can type faster and much more legibly than it is achievable to compose in longhand. Nor have I ever identified any type of handwriting program that lets me talk rapidly and accurately with a personal computer. The nearest point would be the phone keyboards that let you slide a finger about them as an alternative of striking individual letters. In any case, they lack all distinctiveness. That is an asset if you are feeding into machines. But the stage of handwriting is not to communicate with machines. In some sense it’s not even a implies of communication with other men and women. It is useful simply because it distances us from machines, and helps make our output the two far more precise and less predictable.

There is so a lot much more encoded in a handwritten page than in something typewritten. The archives of metadata that Google or the NSA can collect about our words can not match the variety and depth of associations that my handwriting reveals to me. It might not be obvious to any individual else, but the purpose of personal imagined is not quickly to be shared.

Handwriting is the expression of all people facets of character that are not able to be shared or even glimpsed on Facebook. Handwriting is what I turn to when I want to learn imagined – the pen, like a divining rod, moves in my hand in the direction of anything I can only come to feel and not however see.

This is partly since it is so much more complex an action than typing. That looks like a disadvantage, but we are bodily, embodied creatures, and need to use muscle tissues when we think appropriately. Just as strolling is much greater than sitting nevertheless if you want to perform out a challenging issue, so does the varied co-ordination necessary to write cursively drive considered more efficiently than just moving fingers up and down on to the keys.

It also captures the disconnected and chaotic methods in which real imagined emerges. A handwritten webpage can have loops, insertions, deletions and marginalia in approaches that pc application really finds difficult to emulate. It operates against the false simplistic certainties of PowerPoint and for that explanation alone is a ability that all democracies must teach.

My own handwriting is minor utilised now. I even now maintain a pen and pad of paper on the creating desk for when I get caught and have to come to feel my way via a hard passage. And only a hand-scrawled web page or 3 of A4 can capture the glorious and nearly dreaming exuberance of believed that often anticipates the day’s initial cup of coffee. But I am the only person who ever reads or tries to go through what I compose that way. Handwriting as a mode of communication with other people is practically dead.

My father had a firm, clear hand. He belonged to a generation in which all important selections had been conveyed in handwriting, and typing was a specialised manual skill, so he essential to be read by other folks. I once discovered his notes on a Foreign Office document in the Public Data Workplace in Kew, and the firm neat downstrokes had hardly altered at all from people of the letters he wrote to me forty many years later on. I see them in my very own hand now: the marks of a Belfast protestant temperament, even though the loops and swinging trails are all my very own.

Using a pen helps us discover thought – but the writing"s on the wall | Andrew Brown

BIS blew its budget, and now the entire higher education sector will have to pay | Andrew McGettigan

A £100m cut in study funding has been proposed as component of a program to uncover £570m in emergency financial savings for the Division for Organization, Innovation and Capabilities. Photograph: DCPhoto / Alamy

No one particular is going to be happy with the news coming out of the Department for Enterprise, Innovation and Skills (BIS). Not students, not private greater education suppliers, not researchers, not the thinktanks, and definitely not the Russell group of 24 elite United kingdom universities, which have previously been inured from the much more deleterious effects of the higher training reforms launched by the coalition government.

The news that the department has spectacularly mismanaged its spending budget affects absolutely everyone in the sector. BIS have to locate emergency cost savings of £570m in 2014-15 – the next fiscal 12 months – and £860m the yr right after (from an operational price range of £13bn). Study, funding for undergraduate research and pupil assistance budgets are anticipated to consider most of the hit in the 2nd 12 months to make up for the fact that ministers allowed undergraduate recruitment at private providers and established universities to run out of manage – meaning government expenditure on student loans has been far larger than anticipated.

On Monday, we realized that the department had written to much more than 20 personal providers begging them to halt recent recruitment to reduce level larger training qualifications. Universities and schools are also implicated right after numbers controls had been relaxed for the most latest undergraduate application cycle. With enrolments buoyant the knock-on funding effect will now be felt in the current recruitment cycle and beyond. The Higher Training Funding Council for England – responsible for funding established universities – should now anticipate a even more £50m minimize in 2014-15.

The planned abolition of the Nationwide Studentship Programme is to be brought forward a 12 months in buy to save £75m – pending the approval of the deputy prime minister, as this programme was 1 of the policies that carried him and most of his MPs into the 2010 vote for higher tuition charges alongside the Conservatives).

With it gone, he really does have absolutely nothing to display for breaking his electoral pledge and he must actually be apologising again. Not least to most of this country’s students – in 2015-sixteen, in buy to conserve £350m, maintenance grants will be reduce by £1,000 per 12 months. There will be increased loans to compensate, but students would then graduate with at least an additional £3,000 of debt.

But these manoeuvres are not sufficient, so David Willetts, minister for universities and science, is proposing a £100m reduce to the annual research budget starting up this coming April. That £4.6bn price range had been protected in money terms for the last few many years though its actual worth will have been eroded by about ten%.

In this summer’s spending round for 2015-sixteen, cuts had been made to teaching and widening participation budgets in buy to carry on to ringfence study and science. That are not able to be maintained anymore and a leaked ministerial briefing dated 13 November outlines the feasible consequences of either closing a huge United kingdom-primarily based facility – such as the Science &amp Technological innovation Funding Council’s central laser facility – or cutting “good quality-associated” funding foremost to the loss of 700 PhD college students and 1,900 full-time equivalent academic salaries.

Universities and academics have just invested years of effort to prepare for the Study Excellence Framework: it determines how the pot for “high quality-related” funding is distributed. A lot of of them will now fret that what is to go in the pot is so tiny that the returns do not repay the time and funds invested on submissions.

Doctoral candidates might see challenging-won spots withdrawn and careers abandoned the following academic posts lost represent the generation of senior researchers and professors.

The briefing memo recommends announcing a figure for cuts to be achieved and leaving it to the research and funding councils to decide in which the axe falls (inside months!). With an escalating concentration of study in the Russell Group, they would most likely consider the majority of that hit. Some expansive company plans may now also be threatened.

Like many others, I believed the government was taking a gamble with the shape of the sector, with market mechanisms very likely to generate far more and a lot more inequality. I had not expected ministers to fail at the basics – dealing with their budgets.

BIS blew its budget, and now the entire higher education sector will have to pay | Andrew McGettigan