ABSTRACT
The Sumerians created the first schools, called tablet houses, to teach writing. They trained children in Sumerian cuneiform by having them copy the symbols on one half of a soft clay tablet onto the other half, using a stylus. Puritans in England and America also developed a script to distance themselves from the seeming Catholicism of the elaborate scripts popular in the 18th century. They adopted the plainer copperplate, or round hand. The Declaration of Independence is written in copperplate. In the American colonies, a “good hand” became a sign of class and intelligence as well as moral righteousness. For many, the prospect of handwriting dying out would signal the end of individualism and the entree to some robotic techno-future. Handwriting slowly became a form of self-expression when it ceased to be the primary mode of written communication.
