Word: spencerian
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Handwriting has never been a static art. The Puritans simplified what they considered hedonistically elaborate letters. Nineteenth century America fell in love with loopy, rhythmic Spencerian script (think Coca-Cola: the soft-drink behemoth's logo is nothing more than a company bookkeeper's handiwork), but the early 20th century favored the stripped-down, practical style touted in 1894's Palmer Guide to Business Writing...
Since drawing circles and lines is not really "writing," third-graders must be taught writing all over again. Schools switch to one of several cursive systems based on the fanciful scripts taught elementary the U.S. in the 18th and writing. centuries, in-the Spencerian style vigorously promoted in the mid-1800s by Platt Rogers Spencer, a scribe and teacher. All these cursive systems, of which the most familiar is probably the variation devised by another teacher, Austin Palmer, are full of accident-prone loops that only a 19th century copper engraver could properly master. Teachers get as discouraged as students...
...political climate in the nation changed from one of conservatism to one of relative liberalism, Spencerian theory rapidly lost its credence. Educators and policy-makers began to see it for what it was, a self-serving, scientifically-bankrupt explanation for maintaining the status...
WILSON'S SYNTHESIS has itself run into opposition, some of it from within the Harvard faculty. His detractors say that culture and not biology is the chief determinant for human behavior and type Wilson's Sociobiology as simply the latest manifestation of the Spencerian notion. An explanation for the persistence of these theories, a group of Boston scientists wrote late last year in the New York Review of Books, is that such theories "consistently tend to provide a genetic justification of the status quo and of existing privileges for certain groups according to class, race...
...Sociobiology is accepted outside the biology labs in social science, as Spencerian logic was, and if the government sees fit to write off present social inequalities as extensions of genetic determinance, all of Wilson's afterthoughts about political neutrality won't change minds. Late apologetics will not serve as a barrier to political misuse of his hypothesis. Like it or not, the new synthesis may be the twentieth century's excuse for radical laissez faire and rigid status...