Teaching, learning, and evaluating: handwriting in Uruguayan public elementary schools in the 1830s.

This article examines the Uruguayan state approach to the teaching of writing in public elementary education during the 1830s, and is an attempt to explain why state officials advanced new pedagogical methods aimed at increasing rationalisation and standardisation. While many different handwriting styles existed in the past, the school system simplified and standardised public education under a single cursive style, the English round-hand. Notwithstanding the state’s standardising directives, Uruguayan teachers combined the pedagogical innovations of Lancaster’s monitorial system with the calligraphic traditions of the old writing masters. According to personal preference and necessity, teachers devised a hybrid system, which implemented new dictation exercises and the use of the writing slate, but preserved the writing masters’ imitation ofmuestras, and the use of quill, ink, and paper. The government arranged an inventive procedure to accurately measure students’ handwriting performance. Theplanas, or samples of students’ handwriting, were useful tools in the standardisation and evaluation of public education. Elementary schools from all over the country forwarded handwriting samples to the central state, or exhibited them in public examination ceremonies, as teachers publicised pedagogical success, and state officials confirmed the general advancement of public education. This study is also an attempt to show that the teaching of writing was part of a greater pedagogical mission and nation-building project: the intentional departure from colonial corporate identities, and the construction of a national community conceived as the sum of its individual citizens. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]