As long as I'm web browsing

[leora]

I know conuly discusses this sometimes, but I happened to stumble upon this article about someone who is shocked and dismayed that schools do not necessarily still teach cursive. And it is full of how people who can't write in cursive are at a serious disadvantage. Which I find ... laughable. Really ridiculous

Comments

[finding_helena]

That person is a little overwrought, but personally it kind of bums me out to think about cursive no longer being taught. Partly because there are people who do prefer cursive to print, and learning both means that people can choose whichever suits them better. Partly because it's a link to others, particularly older generations. Are today's kids not going to be able to read their grandparents' letters because they're in cursive? (My mom still writes in cursive.) What about those old diaries from great-great-grandma that are in the attic? Etc.

[leora]

I can see a value to learning cursive, and I think some people will do so. But it's a question of time. If schools are thinking to themselves, well, nowadays a kid has to be able to type, and they should also learn things about using the internet safely, and we want to add computer programming and computer literacy, because a child without those skills is going to have serious issues. And then they still want to have science, art, math, reading, writing, music, gym, and so forth... Well, I can see why they might decide that something that takes an enormous amount of time to learn and has limited value is worth cutting. Personally, I'd have far, far preferred they had started me on a foreign language when I was in Elementary School rather than waiting until it would be far more difficult for me to learn one than have them devote the time to cursive

[ukelele]

YES, also what you say about time. As a teacher I felt like there was always pressure to add one more thing to what I taught -- often one more thing that wasn't Latin, that was outside my training and often outside my competency -- but there was almost never any pressure to cut something. And at some point you can't teach, you know, Latin (or whatever your subject happens to be), because there's all this other stuff cutting in on the day. I am glad to see people willing to admit that something might be a lower priority, and should go away to give space to higher priorities.

[finding_helena]

You and leora make good points here. I keep hearing about extras being cut in school, not added... so if they're going to eliminate cursive, I'd like to know what they're adding instead or what they're spending more time on.

[pthalogreen]

I write exclusively in cursive. When I learned Serbian cyrillic, I set aside some time to practice cyrillic cursive. It only took an afternoon (I was an adult and had already mastered fine motor control and do not have dysgraphia or dyslexia, so that was all to my advantage) and I now have very beautiful penmanship in Serbian. I managed to pick a style that doesn't like a child's carefully crafted letters or the usual adult's quick scrawl, and is quite readable. I think my cursive is readable in English as well, though my writing has gotten more European over time (to ensure that Hungarians could read what I'm writing), which means Americans probably would have trouble deciphering some of my letters -- my cursive r and v look almost identical at this point. I need to work on that

[akiko]

my cursive r and v look almost identical at this point.

Mine too! Also my ns and us are indistinguishable, because I spent a year studying in Germany. (Many handwritten German signs have a little upside-down circumflex thing over us to distinguish them from ns. This may be an artifact of an older copybook style, though.)

[leora]

Personally, I didn't view it as much of a choice. Print was mandatory from sixth grade on. Handing in assignments in cursive simply wasn't allowed. And almost all of the writing I was doing was for school, because I didn't have time for much of anything else. I suspect a lot of children will be doing similarly, except with more typing thrown in. I think it's more an issue of how many adults will take the time to learn cursive, since it is a skill you can learn in adulthood and I don't think it's one you have a serious advantage from learning early (unlike foreign languages). And it's hard to guess, but given how easy it is to learn such a thing as an adult, I think people who do more writing by hand might well take a look at it and see whether it suits them. Just as I toyed with calligraphy on my own, even though it wasn't taught in school. I didn't get very far, as I only had one book on it, but I learned just enough that I could make my writing legible when I wanted to. I think cursive is easier to learn than calligraphy, since you

[akiko]

I learned cursive from a workbook my mom bought me when I was in kindergarten. I had the damnedest time with lowercase k, though, and I could never figure out why capital Q looked like number 2.

[redbird]

At this point, I handwrite either slowly and carefully in print (which is for anything other than signing my name that someone else will need to read), or quickly and messily in something resembling cursive. But the least-legible bits of that are thinking-aloud journal entries that I rarely go back to look at, and almost never once I'm done with that physical volume. (So it may not be a disadvantage that most other people wouldn't be able to read it, and that even I have difficulty sometimes.) If I want my signature to actually look like my name, I have to slow down and think; this may yet become a problem, because the versions on my bank account signature card and on the voter register do look like my name.

The only advantage I can think of offhand to being able to write both ways is that I've used the print much less, so it hasn't had time to deteriorate the way the cursive has; if I only knew print, that might be almost illegible by now (my 3s are problematic as is).