General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: The problem with you kids today is that you don't write in cursive [View all]politicat
(9,808 posts)Which means we understand better what is going on in the brain and can therefore apply it to practice.
If you go back to earlier education systems (mid-late Victorian and Edwardian are the ones I've looked at most), written alphabet drills were an early and limited part (and were dependent on the writing method being taught -- Spencer vs Palmer). Spencer and Palmer are supposed to move on to whole words after about 30 lessons (which is 2-3 months in instruction time). Oddly, in the 1910s-20s, those drills were massively increased because there as a theory that the drilling would improve English language acquisition amongst the children of non-native/colloquial English speakers. Obviously, once that theory was taught in the teaching colleges, it would endure for decades.
What you were learning was absolutely functional practice, no doubt. What we don't know is if that functional practice made learning to read, write and process written language easier for your cohort. (And we can't find out because that would be proscribed human experimentation.) I don't know which reading system your school used (the 50s were the transition point between the whole language/core words system and the phonics system) but I would suspect that yours was a core words system.
What we do know is that functional practice of skills is absolutely essential, and that is the thing that gets dropped from most modern education. Functional practice sucks -- it's boring, it's repetitive and we all hate doing it because it feels like we never really progress. It's the same concept as practicing scales on a piano, or lay-ups, or basic math drills. (Note that teachers don't especially like doing functional practice lessons either -- students hate them, parents hate them, everyone thinks it's a waste of time -- but they're actually quite necessary.)
Part of the reason you still write is because you got the 10,000 hours of practice in while you were still acquiring language. We've got a few clients in the memory clinic who learned to write between 3 and 5 and we find that they're losing writing much more slowly than math or other, later skills.