I remember how unusual it was for a child to write with the left hand in the Soviet school system. Today, a left-handed child usually causes little concern. Schools can make small adjustments, and teachers generally understand that some children simply hold a pencil differently.

Several decades ago, things could be quite different.

In the Soviet Union, many children were taught to write with their right hand. Nobody necessarily asked which hand felt natural. The expectation was that the child would use the right one because that was considered the correct hand.

The idea itself was much older than the Soviet Union. For centuries, people in different parts of the world had associated the left side with something improper or wrong. Even the word "left" carried negative associations in many languages. Children were therefore often encouraged, or pressured, to use the other hand.

Soviet schools had conditions that made this approach especially easy to maintain. Classes were large, rules were shared by everyone, and teachers were expected to teach many children at the same time. Reading, writing and discipline all had to fit into the same system. A child who needed something different could easily be seen as creating an additional difficulty.

"Write with your right hand"

The process usually began in the first or second grade, when children were learning to write.

A teacher might move a left-handed child to another position at the desk. They could watch which hand held the pen, make remarks, or ask the parents to practice with the child at home. Some teachers simply kept repeating the same instruction: "Write with your right."

There were harsher methods too. In some cases, adults could hold a child's left hand back or otherwise prevent the child from using it, trying to make the right hand do the work. For a child, this meant having to control movements that had previously felt completely natural.

For a long time, many adults didn't understand that left-handedness wasn't a habit that could simply be changed. It was understood as a feature of how the brain worked. The child hadn't chosen the left hand. It was simply the hand that felt more natural.

Some specialists questioned the practice even then. Psychologists and doctors pointed out that forced retraining could cause difficulties for some children, reporting problems with writing, increased anxiety, tiredness and difficulty concentrating.

Those views took a long time to become widespread. Schools continued to follow the familiar rules, and forced retraining of left-handed children remained especially common in the middle of the 20th century.

The attitude began to change

During the 1960s and 1970s, developments in child psychology and brain research gradually changed the discussion. Left-handedness itself came to be understood as something that wasn't a defect. More specialists began arguing that children should write with the hand that felt natural to them.

By the end of the Soviet period, attitudes had become noticeably calmer. Some schools still tried to retrain left-handed children, while more teachers allowed them to continue writing with their left hand. The practice didn't disappear completely until later.

Soviet teachers weren't people who deliberately wanted to hurt children, most of them anyway. They were following what had already become normal practice, and the system placed a high value on uniformity and discipline, where a child who did something differently could attract attention just for that.

When I look back at this now, the interesting part is how ordinary the old assumption once seemed. A child could be treated as having something that needed correction, simply because of the hand they used to write.

For anyone who went to school in the Soviet period, this is one of those details that can bring the whole atmosphere back surprisingly quickly.