I doubt it would be a significant handicap not knowing how to write cursive.
It would, however, be a handicap not knowing how to read cursive.
I write in cursive very rarely, but I encounter written cursive quite frequently.
And, as others have mentioned, what could it hurt?
Can he sign his name in cursive? He needs to be able to do that at a bare minimum, I think…
Cursive is awesome, and it is also in serious danger of becoming extinct. Definitely teach him cursive. I hated learning it when I was a kid, but now whenever I find myself doing any kind of hand-writing, I take great pleasure in lovingly detailing every letter in cursive so they flow together like a symphony. People tell me I “write like a girl” when they see my cursive, which is a backhanded compliment. I typically make it extremely ornate, with a lot of unnecessary flourishes and curly lines.
Those of you who don’t use cursive, do you sign your name using printing?
When I was living in Germany, I had a sweet, elderly woman who lived next door and she couldn’t carry heavy items, so I would pick things up for her when I went to the store.
She would write me notes, in old German cursive, that I eventually figured out how to read.
Later, my German friends were in shock that I could read it, as most of them couldn’t!
If you want to see an example of what her handwriting looked like, here is the font style.
But back to the OP - I learned cursive in school, and for the first sentence or two, I can write really beautifully - but it sure does get sloppy by sentence three, and by about the fifth sentence, even I can’t read it anymore - thus I have learned to print really fast.
I use cursive for the occasional address on a birthday card, but that is about the extent of it.
No. He is in 5th grade now, and academics will be ramping up. IF he has time and is not involved in other enrichments,(Art, music, sports, etc) THEN he might have some time to spend on this essentially useless skill. With how jam-packed today’s kids’ schedules already often are, I wouldn’t want to burden someone further.
Of course if he just hangs out all day playing video games, then go for it.
My WAG: **dactylic hexameter **meant that when it came to that I, s/he had to think about it, about the motion required – it didn’t just flow like other letters do.
No, but I’ve seriously considered signing my name in print. My print is much more consistent; my signature never even looks the same. My print, on the other hand, has been pretty much the same since high school. The biggest difference is that I now put a tail on my lowercase t, because I kept getting it confused with plus signs in circuits class.
The whole point of cursive is that the letters flow together, so that you can write a whole word without lifting your pen from the page (or your marker from the dry-erase board, or whatever), as opposed to printing where you have to make each letter separate. This allows you to write faster and more fluidly, at least once you get the hang of it.
I wouldn’t insist on it, but if he wants to learn, I’d make the time to show him how.
You only get to encourage so many enrichment things above and beyond school, and I wouldn’t make this one of them. The rudiments of a foreign language or sentence diagramming or the basics of logic would all be more useful, IMO. And I’m an English teacher.
acsenray and emilyforce,
what I meant was, if you look at this link , it shows the capital ‘I’ as I was taught it. I couldn’t remember where the embellishment/leadinthingy was supposed to go, on the left (which really makes little sense), or on the right. In the end, I think my "I"s ended up more like the capital “L” shown in the link, with a shorter foot.
I’m a she, btw. 
When I said I rarely write in cursive anymore, I wasn’t including signatures. My signature is really more of my own unique mark than it is proper cursive, anyway.
This.
My mom is a sixth grade teacher, and when she told me the story of a parent this year who was insistent that his son improve his cursive, and she asked him why on earth he’d waste his time with some archaic skill he’d never have to use…well, that’s when I knew the final nail was in the coffin of cursive.
If my mom and Manda JO say it’s not worth it, it is, indeed, a dying art. Let it go. You’d make better use of your time having him teach you how to txt.
You may as well teach him hieroglyphics.
True, but he will undoubtedly type a lot more than he writes.
Anyway I don’t think cursive is important - printing is easier to read.
Yeah, but won’t it be embarrassing when Grandma dies and he has to get someone else to read her hand-written will?
Seriously, I encounter documents in cursive all the time. I get actual handwritten letters to the editor at my newspaper, there are reams of handwritten documents in my family genealogy files, people loan me books with their names written in cursive in them, I got a handwritten list of books from a librarian (wouldn’t it be fun to call a customer and say “I can’t get you those books because I can’t read cursive?”), people leave little notes on my desk when I’m not there, of which probably 1/4 are in cursive, and on and on and on.
You can easily get through life these days without writing in cursive. Not being able to read cursive is a definite handicap.
I’m saddened that this is even a topic for discussion.
Being able to “write cursive” has nothing to do with memorizing the specific stroke sequences and letterforms of any particular hand. It never mattered whether you could reproduce that specific hand’s capital I from memory. That’s not what being able to write by hand is about. The failure to understand that is apparently a key to understanding how terrible your handwriting instructor was.
There is no such thing as “proper” cursive. Every person’s handwriting constitutes a “unique mark.”
Rubbish. Because “cursive” writing is no longer used by any living person to communicate in a living language? People will always be writing by hand. It’s a valuable skill to know how to write by hand and read what someone else has written by hand. The specific letterforms will, as they always have, evolve over time. The skill in question is largely the mental flexibility to handle variability, something that will always be part of human language.
If he’s a girl, yes. For some reason girls need to write in cursive. If not, no.
If he’s a girl, then he has bigger problems than learning cursive.
