Editing Penmanship (section)

=== Schools in East Asia ===
[[File:KanjiPractice.jpg|thumbnail|A typical Kanji practice notebook of a 3rd grader]]

By the nineteenth century, attention was increasingly given to developing quality penmanship in Eastern schools.  Countries that had a writing system based on logographs and syllabaries placed particular emphasis on form and quality when learning.<ref name="Gray, William S. 1961 pg 189">Gray, William S. (1961) "The Teaching of Reading and Writing". Chicago: Scott, Foresman, and Company. p. 189.</ref> These countries, such as China and Japan, have pictophonetic characters that are difficult to learn.  Chinese children start by learning the most fundamental characters first and building to the more esoteric ones.  Often, children trace the different strokes in the air with the teacher and eventually start writing them on paper.<ref name="Gray, William S. 1961 pg 189"/>

In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, there have been more efforts to simplify these systems and standardize handwriting.  For example, in China in 1955, in order to respond to illiteracy among people, the government introduced a Romanized version of Chinese script, called [[Pinyin]].<ref name="Robinson, Andrew 2007 pg 196">Robinson, Andrew. (2007) The Story of Writing. London: Thames & Hudson Ltd. p. 196.</ref> However, by the 1960s, people rebelled against the infringement upon traditional Chinese by foreign influences.<ref name="Robinson, Andrew 2007 pg 196"/> This writing reform did not help illiteracy among peasants.  Japanese also has simplified the Chinese characters it uses into scripts called kana.  However kanji are still used in preference over kana in many contexts, and a large part of children's schooling is learning kanji.<ref>Robinson, Andrew. (2007) The Story of Writing. London: Thames & Hudson Ltd. p. 208.</ref> Moreover, Japan has tried to hold on to handwriting as an art form while not compromising the more modern emphasis on speed and efficiency.  In the early 1940s, handwriting was taught twice, once as calligraphy in the art section of school curricula, and then again as a functional skill in the language section.<ref name="Adal, Raja 2009 pg 244">Adal, Raja. (2009). "Japan's Bifurcated Modernity: Writing and Calligraphy in Japanese Public Schools 1872-1943." ''Theory Culture Society.'' 26:233-248. p. 244.</ref> The practical function of penmanship in Japan did not start to be questioned until the end of the twentieth century; while typewriters proved more efficient than penmanship in the modern West, these technologies had a hard time transferring to Japan, since the thousands of characters involved in the language made typing unfeasible.<ref name="Adal, Raja 2009 pg 244"/>