I participate in an "old home town" website that focuses on the "wonder years" life once characteristic of the community. A recent item asked whether left-handed students had ever been coerced to become righties. As a former school-district brat (my mother was an administrator and teacher), I recall that the left vs. right subject came up when a friend's grandmother talked about her 19th Century experience of such coercion, including having her left hand tied behind her back during writing exercises. I don't believe the the local schools ever officially coerced kids to switch, though some individual teachers may have done so on their own.

I recall that several lefties became much more ambidextrous than anyone else. I also recall that lefties had some clear disadvantages in the classroom. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, ballpoint pens had not penetrated the classroom; we wrote first with pencils and then with fountain pens or old-style India ink pens with separable points (I still have some that my mother saved; those who attended the lone elementary school of the 1920s, 30s and 40s will recall the old-style desks with the hole for the ink bottle). The written output was slow to dry; one either blotted or waited, so lefties were often last to finish assignments. Of course, if you were left-handed, you also went home with sometimes indelible ink on the heel of your left hand and on the wrist and elbow if your left sleeve.

Note to historians: Because around 90 percent of people are righties, I've long suspected that the predominant shift to LTR alphabets is mostly about reducing our global laundry bill.