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School Prejudices Against Left-Handed Children
Left-Handed Couturier Scissors by Garrett Wade on Flickr. Some rights reserved.
I have documented before how schools fail left-handed children and the experience of our own children at one school. (They later had worse trouble at another school where the Head said they should just adapt to a right-handed world and didn’t even believe you could use computers left-handed.)
This followed my own experiences in the Seventies when my secondary school failed to be supportive, not least in the use of fountain pens and also the enforced use of chairs with hinged desks that were only suitable for the right-handed. Some of that probably contributed to a chronic neck pain problem.
I might have hoped things would have changed. Not if my children’s schooling is anything to go by. And I now read of a school that forces left-handers to eat right-handed on the grounds of it being part of a social development programme, even though this caused one child to have tics and a stammer.
I would dearly like to hear some comments from educators on this issue. It’s outrageous. If schools think that simply providing left-handed scissors in the classroom is sufficient provision, they are deluded and complacent.
Schools Fail Left-Handed Children
I have blogged about this before a few years ago, but now my suspicions – no, fears – are confirmed: school teachers are not adequately prepared to support left-handed children. Being left-handed myself and having two left-handed children, I find it monstrous that in a society where computer use is essential, schools don’t even know you can use a PC (Windows, Mac or Linux) left-handed. All three of the schools our children have attended have not known this basic fact. In two of them, they were receptive when we made an approach as parents. In their last school, the Head flatly told us it was impossible to use a computer anything other than right-handed. She didn’t like it when I then threatened to bring in my brother-in-law, who is in management with Microsoft and who is also a school governor elsewhere. She told us: “Left-handed children just have to adapt to living in a right-handed world.”
Will someone please explain to me why this prejudice is acceptable, when we have long rejected the cruel way in which left-handed children were forced to write right-handed, and given corporal punishment if they didn’t comply? Just what is the difference?
I know this isn’t on my usual topics of Christianity and ministry, but I’m angry that children should be let down like this.
