We're Raising a Generation of Mentally Retarded Children

WEST HARTFORD, Conn. --As Daria Caruso's high school seniors watched the 1959 Alfred Hitchcock film "North by Northwest" in an advanced English class, one scene, in particular, puzzled them. On the screen was a paper note, a message handwritten in cursive script.

The message was pivotal to the plot, but, for many of the students, it might as well have been written in a foreign language.

"They couldn't read the message," said Caruso, a teacher at West Hartford's Conard High School. "I had to back up the (film) and read it to them."

Relying more and more on e-mail, blogs, Web sites, instant messaging and other electronic forms of communication, students at all levels are forgetting the fine art of handwriting, educators say. Cursive script, the graceful looping style that connects one letter to another, might be going the way of the inkwell and the fountain pen.

When students do write by hand, many resort to printing, educators say.