Or, as my aide reports the goings-on in America's "special ed" classrooms (or at least Virginia's), teachers and other school officials deciding/declaring that a child can't understand or read the alphabet until it can be proven that the child can write the alphabet -- using either the standard writing implements, or a single type of "adaptive" implements.

As she said to me, last year, when J was first entering nursery school: "It's like saying 'We won't teach you the alphabet until you can prove to us you can knit with your toes."

Basically, the whole school system here is aimed at reshaping kids in order to make them fit specific modes of predetermined test-taking methods.