page_title: Penmanship
section_title: Schools in East Asia
hierarchical_section_title: Penmanship / Teaching methods and history / Schools in East Asia
caption_attribution_description: A typical Kanji practice notebook of a 3rd grader. From the right column, 昭和(Showa), 意味(meaing), 味(taste), 練り(knead). The teacher writes in red "Nice penmanship. Very good. June 29. (Teacher's signature stamp says "Matsumoto" ) In this class, the number on the blue sticker shows how much a student has practiced. In this photo he wrote 242 columns of Kanji and received 27 bonus points. The rabbit stamp says "Keep up the good work!" And the pencil from Dazaifu reads "Don't rely on others. Do it on your own."
context_page_description: Penmanship is the technique of writing with the hand using a writing instrument. Today, this is most commonly done with a pen, or pencil, but throughout history has included many different implements. The various generic and formal historical styles of writing are called "hands" while an individual's style of penmanship is referred to as "handwriting".
context_section_description: By the nineteenth century, attention was increasingly given to developing quality penmanship in Eastern schools.  Countries which had a writing system based on logographs and syllabaries placed particular emphasis on form and quality when learning.  These countries, such as China and Japan, have pictophonetic characters which 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 along with the teacher and eventually start to write them on paper.
  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.   However, by the 1960s, people rebelled against the infringement upon traditional Chinese by foreign influences.   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.  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.  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.
caption: A typical Kanji practice notebook of a 3rd grader
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