Page:Theory and Practice of Handwriting.djvu/39

Rh One must however at once meet an objection which was made on the part of a teacher.

"If in a school" says he "one subject is cultivated so much beyond others as writing is with Dr. Bayr and if the attitude of the body is so closely supervised as by him then it is no wonder that the children sit upright. It must not be forgotten that girls especially. when these experiments are carried out easily exaggerate involuntarily the faulty postures of body in oblique writing. Moreover the pupils if they do not wish to be in the way with their pen when writing are forced to a position of the hand in which they can only write a round style or Roman hand: therefore the introduction of vertical writing will be equivalent to the adoption of Roman hand by the exclusion of the present current hand: the latter is however a national peculiarity," and so on. One sees with what remarkable views hygienic questions can be judged.

A reply is necessary because this solitary voice apparently represents the opinion of a whole party.

Before everything it must be mentioned that the bad position of pupils in Oblique writing as it was observed in Herr Bayr's school differs as little in character as in degree from the usual writing position as can be seen at any time in any school and as has been observed since special attention was given to the bodily attitude of pupils. A warning from the teacher improves the position for a few minutes but quite spontaneously the oblique position soon returns.

Even if the continual upright position during the practice of vertical writing were only the result of a firm discipline it would be a circumstance greatly in favour of this style. Furthermore in other schools where no attention is given to the position of the ground strokes—in which on the contrary the principle of leaving the slant of the letters to the fancy of the pupil holds good—it was observed that individual scholars who had a specially correct posture wrote in upright fashion or nearly so and here any special oversight of the pupils was completely excluded.