August 10, 2026
THE DAILY McLUHAN DIALOGUES™ • McDialogues™
Understanding the Grammars of Electric Culture and Propaganda Science™
An Exploration of Technology Ecology as an Anchor in a Sea of Change™ and Tactical Training in Counter-Propaganda Science™
by Nelson S. Thall
Former Director/Chief Archivist, Marshall McLuhan Center On Global Communications, Ross, Ca.
The Hand Comes Back As A Hobby:They Are Not Teaching Him to Write. They Are Teaching Him to Be Himself.
A Student of Technology asks:
My grandson brought me a birthday card from his great-grandmother last week and asked me to read it out loud. He could not read it himself. It was in cursive.
Then I saw the news. New Jersey signed a law in January requiring public schools to provide "instruction in cursive handwriting for students in grades three through five," starting this September. Iowa has required it since 2024. Why bring it back now, after they spent twenty years getting rid of it?
Nelson S. Thall replies:
Look at what the schools put in its place. They taught printing. Block letters, each one standing alone, each one a copy of type. Set thirty children to printing and you get thirty pages that look the same. The child was trained to imitate the machine that had already replaced him, and he was graded on how well he did it. Meanwhile the rest of his hours moved to the speed of light, where he goes out as an image with no body attached. Discarnate is the word for it. Sent without flesh. Everyone arrives the same way and nobody is anywhere, and a boy who is nowhere in particular has nothing in particular to be.
Cursive is the opposite motion. The hand never lifts. The arm is in it, the shoulder is in it, the whole body is in it, and the word comes out as one gesture. A gesture is a person. Set those same thirty children to cursive and you get thirty different pages carrying the same words. That is why the boy could not read the card and you could. His great-grandmother's body is in that ink. Her hand has left the room, but its gesture remains on the page. It was one of the first things a child learned to make that carried the signature of his own bodily gesture, and most of them lost it before they knew they had it.
Now it returns as a subject, taught for three years and tested for proficiency. McLuhan and Wilfred Watson set the pattern down in From Cliché to Archetype, borrowing Joyce's phrase: past time are pastimes. The dominant technology of one age becomes the hobby of the next. But ask what the boy is actually being trained for. Not correspondence. Not note taking. The machine can already produce ordinary writing faster, cleaner, and more uniformly. What the machine cannot do is be him, and that is the whole of the lesson. Put the pen in his hand and the arm moves, the shoulder moves, the body comes back into the work, and what appears on the page is nobody else's. In a world where he is sent everywhere as an image and arrives nowhere as a man, three years of cursive gives him one place he is unmistakably present. They are not teaching him to write. They are teaching him to be himself, and to heighten his identity while the electric age is busy dissolving it.
-30-
Sources: New Jersey P.L. 2025, c.284, signed January 19, 2026; New Jersey Department of Education guidance to Local Educational Agency Leads, February 11, 2026. Iowa cursive requirement, effective June 2024. Marshall McLuhan and Wilfred Watson, From Cliché to Archetype (New York: Viking, 1970).
All intellectual property contained herein was conceived, originated and authored exclusively by Nelson S. Thall. Artificial intelligence, aka a pseudo-conscious machine (PCM), was not employed. We hired a stenographer. No intellectual contribution or creative authorship is attributed to the AI tool. All rights of authorship and ownership vest entirely and exclusively with Nelson S. Thall.
© 2026 Nelson S. Thall. All Rights Reserved.
I can be reached at: nelson@themediumisthemessage.com