I have a dream that there is a school that the kids learning there will have to use only fountian pen.
Every end of year the 3 best students in class will get a new pen:

Best Pelikan M800
Second best M600
And third an M400

Best in school will get a MB 149

There will be caligraphy classes and neatness will be important.

I can dream cant I ?

When I was a kid until grade 4 we were not allowed to use pens only pencils and after that a BIC STICK was the tool of choice.
Fountain pens were not even a dream.
My sister that is few years older then me had a Parker 21 or 51 not sure but for me it was BP or RB all the way to adulthood.

Nice dream. However..................

The MB and the Pelikan 800 and 600 are likely to be far too large for young students who are learning to write. They have small hands!

While I think it is useful for students to learn to write with fountain pens, I oppose restricting them to fountain pens. They should be taught the relative advantages and disadvantages of each sort of writing implement, from brush to crayon to pencil to quill to dip pen, to fountain pen to ball point and to roller ball. Each is "most" suitable for certain situations and the students get to learn a bit about the history of writing.

Andy

It would be great. A wonderful project would be to start with papyrus paper and a simple stylus. Separate the kids into small groups and have each one work as a scribe and then whitewash the paper for the next group. You could do the same with clay. Not sure how to do quill and vellum. Astorparche scrolls? Such an art project would tie directly into world history in a variety of ways.

I don't think that I was allowed pens in school until 6th grade. But a Bic stick was never, never my tool of choice. I just couldn't use them for extensive writing. Before my first fountain pen, if I couldn't find a Pilot V5 or other rolling ball, I just stuck with pencil. And that's more or less the way I write today. I always keep a couple of ball points in my purse or bookbag for quick notes, signatures, lending to other people, etc, but if I need to do serious writing and I don't have a fountain pen, I just write with pencil.

Well, come to France and raise your kids there. At 6, they will learn to write using a FP, and if you buy a couple of Pelikans the teacher will be glad to give them to the kids who got the best results (they usually give smaller rewards since they buy it with their money...)

There's a school in Scotland, I believe, which allows its students to use only fountain pens for writing.

Yeah, I heard that too. I have a friend who went to the "British School of Boston," and he was required to use a fountain pen.

When I went to school in England, from the beginning (age 7/8), we were only allowed to use fountain pens. If you did your homework with a biro it was not accepted and you failed. I think a pencil was preferred over a biro. So everyone had to write with a fountain pen. Once we went to senior school (age 11/12 I think), it was a little less strict and you could get away with using a roller ball.

Of course, the pen of choice at the time was the Parker Vector. But as these were too expensive for us kids to lose all the time (and the refills were not cheap) so most of us used cheap plastic generic fountain pens that took international cartridges. One or two people had Sheaffer pens but they were considered weird (having to unscrew their caps when the rest of us just popped them off). No one used ink bottles, everyone used cartridges. That didn't stop all of us from having ink stained fingers!

There was a time of course when fountain pens in school was a complete no no and dip pens and pencils were all that were used. My personal view is that teaching handwriting first with pencils and then dip pens when slightly older may be a very good way to teach handwriting. The pencils stop the kids messing about with ink at a very early age and then dip pens (with suitable ink and preferably italic or flexible) force the user to take their time when forming letters. Such a method would bring numerous advantages, children would not develop hands that were tensed up with a Bic for instance, they would learn about the history of writing, they could learn it from an art perspective and so on. I also think that all schools should have sloped writing surfaces instead of these stupid tables that are too low and not designed for writing, plus they should get proper chairs that don't force people to slouch forward!
The fountain pen could be something that the later years of school use and of course teachers.

Over here it's complete opposite. FPs are the only tools allowed.

My friend from Colombia attended a German-operated elementary school while she was there, and recalled using Pelikan fountain pens.

In my primary school, they let us use anything with ink.

Although while I was going to school in the 1950's it was all pencil, all of our school desks had the cut out for an inkwell. Never bothered to ask when they made the change over.

I think I read that article, too. I believe they COMPUSLE the students to use FP's, which of course, I think is better for them in the long run.

I found it first on Wikipedia, but then I found another article about the school when I was flipping through Google. Aaaah...

I remember when I was in school. We all started out with pencils. And then in Year 4 (When we were 10 years old and Princess Dianna had just died in a Paris car-crash...yes, it was 1997) we recieved our "Pen licenses". I'm not kidding. We got little laminated cards with our photos on them, which stated that we, as responsible, grown-up young men!, were now officially entitled to make use of ink-filled writing instruments.

Needless to say, I immediately started taking fountain pens to school and everyone noticed. I remember one kid who even took a dip-pen and bottle of ink to school. I can't remember who it was, but I remember the ink was blue.