Page:Theory and Practice of Handwriting.djvu/160

142 “ Perpendicular Writing in Schools” A Lecture delivered by Dr. Paul Schubert, on the 23rd Oct. 1890 before the Society of Public Hygiene at Nuremberg.

The proposal to replace the customary oblique writing by perpendicular characters arose from the endeavour to obtain an upright healthy writing posture in school-children, an object which hitherto, though means of every kind were tried, had never been attained. Every teacher knows how much patience and lung-power the constant injunctions to sit straight demand, how much time is thereby taken away from the proper tasks of instruction, and how nevertheless after a short period the children always sink back again into those bodily distortions with which we are all so familiar, as if a strong magnet were dragging down their heads towards the left side of the copy-book.

Complaints about this are of very ancient date and are repeated in almost every treatise on school hygiene. The worst of it is that every child very soon gets accustomed to his own peculiar cramped way of sitting, which he always resumes during the many hundred writing lessons of his school-life, so that always the same organs are again burdened and the same functions hindered. Everyone thinks chiefly of the dangers of short-sight and crooked growth; scarcely less prejudicial is the hindrance to full respiration and the impeding of the circulation of the blood in the organs of the lower body, with all their consequences, into the details of which we cannot enter here.

To two medical authors, Ellinger and Gross, belongs the glory of having explicitly pointed out in numerous publications, about 1874–5, that the cause of the bad posture of children while writing ought not to be looked for as hitherto in external matters, nor should the blame be laid on the teacher, but that the ultimate reason for oblique sitting lay rather in the way of writing itself; this latter would have to be entirely revolutionised, and in particular a copy-book pushed sideways towards the right must not be tolerated in the case of any child; for herein lay the root of the worst distortions of eye, head, and trunk. In the positive part of their labours, however, Ellinger and Gross were neither in agreement with one another, nor did their views coincide with what we to-day believe should be pronounced the solution of the question.

At first Ellinger demanded oblique writing on a copy-book lying obliquely before the middle of the body; but in the year 1885 he joined the Middle Franconia Reform Movement and professed the