Opinion: The essential forgotten school subject
During my first year at USU, I realized there’s an extremely important academic subject that is almost always overlooked and never talked about — the history of writing.
Learning to write properly is a critical aspect of every education, but it wasn’t until my freshman year of college that I started wondering how and where writing originated. As a kid, I imagined two scholars sitting with paper and pen, deciding on how each word in the English language should sound. This is obviously not the case, but it shows how little access students have to accurate information.
Professor Joyce Kinkead, who has unfortunately retired this summer, taught the honors History of Writing course. In that class, I learned the truth: the Latin alphabet evolved over many centuries throughout countless cultures.
The first form of writing was called cuneiform, which arose in the Ancient Middle East to keep track of agricultural digits. It was accomplished by pressing a reed stylus into a soft clay tablet to create wedge-shaped symbols that represented different details.
There are hundreds of Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, and it takes an expert to decipher them. But they were key to the Latin alphabet we use today. Many consider Egypt the first culture to have a true writing system because they used shapes to represent sounds instead of just objects.
For example, the meaning of a hieroglyph featuring a bird may have nothing to do with birds, but instead makes up a larger word that included a syllable that sounded similar to the spoken Egyptian word for “bird.”
Hieroglyphs started as symbols representing objects and changed to symbols signifying sounds, making them a true written language.
This process has directly impacted the Latin script widely used today. The letter “A” originated as an Egyptian symbol of a bull’s head. As the language spread to other cultures, such as Phoenician, Greek, and Latin, the bull got turned upside down into the “A” we use today. There are many similar examples of this transformation from Egyptian to Latin.
The history of the alphabet and writing tools such as pencils, keyboards, typewriters and more should be taught widely in K-12 education. If it is continued to be pushed aside as an elective course in higher education, many will miss out on understanding where this vital tool came from, and why it should be appreciated.
If this subject was mandatory for all levels of education in some form, then several traditional subjects can be taught in greater depth and in a way that sparks more understanding and appreciation for how the world got to where it is.
Because of the thousands of influences throughout the centuries that made writing what it is, humankind can quite literally preserve and transfer thoughts to people who may not live in the same place or time.
The history of writing is an important subject because almost every career will use writing in some form or another. Writing is a refined skill that makes the world go round, but most people don’t give it a second thought.