Why did teachers in the past make left-handed kids write wit

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Why did teachers in the past tie the left hand of left-handed kids behind their back and make them write with their right hand? Is this like trying to get a carnivorous animal to eat vegetables?

They thought they would have an easier life if they appeared to be "normal."

This.

But it was a delusional approach - all the left-handed people I know who were subjected to it learnt to write rather poorly with their right hand, used their left when nobody saw them and fully switched to the left after finishing school. Torturing them was useless.

My father's teacher told him he would go to Hell for being left handed. Then they punished him for poor performance with his right hand. He was struck by the teacher for having sloppy penmanship with his right hand.

^
Yeah, back in the day there was a lot of religious superstition revolving around being left-handed

Sorry your father had to put up with that crap, I know people who were quite traumatised by similar methods.

This was in the 1930s. He was also undiagnosed autistic with a speech impediment. He ended up staying home from school almost exclusively until high school because he was so afraid of the bullies. That's how he learned to be such an incredible engineer (from his father) and to knit and decorate (from his mother). I posted a picture once, showing him build a car motor by hand when he was five or six.



Here he is again! Note the left hand, folks!

^
Thank you for posting it Isabella, he sounds like a remarkable person and that's a really cool picture!

Originally, the Latin word for "left," "sinister" didn't have any connotations for good or bad, but in the Classical era, it started to take on associations with misfortune, awkwardness, and evil. (Other societies throughout history have done the same sort of thing, but not all--the left hand has also been linked with wisdom, skill, magic, healing, and divinity.) So much superstition!

Growing up as a lefty, I clearly remember an older elementary school teacher deriding me, saying, "you write like a cripple" as she observed me. It was the mid/late '70s, and I remember telling myself that she was speaking from an old-fashioned bias that I should shrug off, but I also knew how incredibly rude it was. She managed to insult both me and kids with genuine physical disabilities/handicaps in one fell swoop, too.

My dad, born in Brooklyn in 1930, was left-handed all his life, and though I don't know for sure, I imagine he faced much, much worse for years. I'm grateful that I grew up in a time and a place that was more accepting.

Same reason some bad schools try to make ND kids act NT these days or in my day how they called my mother because I had a girlfriend.

They fear the kid being different.

They need to learn that the only different which is bad is the different which makes someone a bully. And sadly that's not that different to the norm

Good point!
It's the same reason my teacher spanked me on my very first day of school. During our activity time, I played with a toy train which was blue. Apparently it was a "boys' toy" and I shouldn't have touched it. I was supposed to infer that it was only available for children with penises, because of its colour. The teacher spanked me and sent me to the "House" activity to play with pink things and children who didn't have a penis. I'm not bitter about this at all.

I wasn't left handed, but my kindergarten teacher did think I was hyperactive or ret*d because I didn't speak English when I started school. That was disproved a year later, but I have felt different to this day.

I was pretty ambidextrous as a child. My mother says I tended to lean more to my left hand being dominate though. But when I got to school they put the pencil in my right and hand. I was really stubborn so even when my mother tried to get me to switch to my left I refused because "teacher said".

So now as a result I hold the pencil/pen wrong in my right hand

There was no sociological reason, but the rather more prosaic one that, given that we write from left to right in this part of the world, those who write with their left hands are likely to smudge their work. This made more sense back in the days when people still wrote in good quality, slow-drying ink.

^This. While there was probably some prejudice/superstition in some quarters, modern folks today tend to be oblivious to the fact that the ball-point pen didn't really become widespread until the 1950s. Prior to that everyone dipped a steel pen in an inkwell. (Haven't you seen children's school desks all with slots for inkwells?) It's hard to push a split penpoint forward from left to right, and hard not to smear the wet ink with your left hand (which is why lefties were purposely taught to "write like a cripple" -- i.e., to hook their arm around so they wouldn't smear the wet ink.

If you think things are better now for lefties, thank the inventors of the ball-point pen, not campaigners against prejudice.

Luckily they had stopped rapping lefty kids on the hand with a ruler in my school district just a few years before I started.

But everything was and still is mostly geared, towered right-handers.

There has always been a stereotype of lefties as flaky and a bit off. Sound familiar?

Might be interesting to survey a hundred under-30 people and ask them what the round hole in the corner is for.

(Most popular answer might be, "It's for the USB cable.")