Hengshui High School, the infamous Chinese "super school" that has made international headlines numerous times over the years for its notoriously high academic standards, strict exam-oriented curriculum and student suicides, is once again in the news.

This time, the school, located in Hebei Province, has come under fire from netizens for forcing its students to write English characters as perfectly as a computer font. A series of handwritten student compositions leaked online reveals scripts that are virtually indistinguishable from a computer - except for harsh criticisms penned in red by overly demanding teachers saying that they are still not good enough.

It is generally agreed by academics and scholars that the rise of our technology-dependent society has resulted in a tragic decline in penmanship (dysgraphia, an inability to write traditional characters with a pen) among entire generations of young students. As kids these days rely more on keystrokes than brush strokes to communicate, hanzi (Chinese characters) has become less important.

But at Hengshui, where high gaokao (China's national college entrance exam) scores have resulted in many of its students being placed in the country's best universities, traditional academics including penmanship still have priority over technology.

Many netizens, however, have decried the school's military-style standardization of its students, especially after some recently leapt to their death, resulting in prison-like cages being built around its classrooms earlier this year. The latest controversy over their strict handwriting rules shows that the school continues to crack the whip at its students.

As a recent high school graduate myself, now attending university in Shanghai, who faced similar scrutiny by my hyper-critical teachers, I recall being told by my English instructor that handwriting in tests matters not just because the school is concerned about carrying on the tradition of calligraphy, but simply because it makes it easier for test graders. In other words, a student's exam scores have less to do with being correct and more to do with legibility.

This is where the truth is revealed about China's flawed educational system, for after further researching the issue online, I found that at many Chinese schools teachers will give their students a low score based on their handwriting alone, regardless of whether their answers were correct - or incorrect for that matter.

For millennia China has had a love affair with its own handwriting. Dating back to the keju imperial examinations of the Tang Dynasty (618-907) that placed great emphasis on calligraphy and brush art to determine if someone was eligible to work in public office, our schools and national exams have carried on this tradition. Even when modern society moved away from brushes to ink pens, then from pens to computers, students are still forced to learn this dying art form.

Indeed, hanzi is now only an art form, for very few Chinese people ever actually write anymore with pens. In the past half-decade China has become a digital society, and a paperless one as well. Yes, we still need to know how to read and write hanzi, but with a keyboard not ink. The same goes for English: what does it matter if my handwritten "f" looks like a "t"?; my iPad will autocorrect it for me anyway!

But for those youngsters who still choose to use pens to communicate, they should be encouraged to express their individuality and creativity through distinctive penmanship. Just like a fingerprint, every person's handwriting is unique. So much so that handwriting analysis has become a form of forensic science, as well as long-term markers of society and identity.

To force pupils to write like a computer font is just Hengshui High School's way of making their student body conform to an outdated educational system, whereby the most pliant and obedient student receives the highest score and those who resist conformity are sent to the back of the classroom.

Unless the Ministry of Education is willing to break this unwritten rule about handwriting when it comes to grading compositions, China's teachers will continue to wield this archaic form of standardization over students, thereby discouraging and preventing the ingenuity and innovation and creativity that China's leadership have said our society so desperately needs.

Global Times