It’s funny, when I was in school, learning cursive was mandatory, but typing was an elective. I only spent a quarter on typing and mastered it, and it has proven itself almost immeasurably more useful over the years. I feel sorry when I see people hunt and peck with 2 fingers looking at a keyboard.
Learning cursive in elementary school was mandatory for me, and I’m pretty sure for everyone of my generation.
Knowing how to type was mandatory in high school, but not taught. My parents were told that the school expected their son (all-boys school) to show up on the first day knowing how to type. So, the summer between eighth grade and high school, my father came home one day with a portable electric typewriter and a how-to-type book, and told me to learn to type. I did.
And yes, it’s quite possibly the most useful and frequently used skill I’ve ever acquired.
I was taught cursive and never used it unless the teacher explicitly required cursive. For whatever reason, cursive was way slower for me to write than printing. I can write notes at almost real-time speed with printing, but cursive is like 1/3 speed. So for me, it was useless since I wouldn’t use it for my own note taking since it was slower. Plus, it’s hard for me to read my own cursive, so it’s harder and slower for me to read my own notes if they are in cursive. Objectively it has some benefits for things like hand-eye coordination, but overall it felt like a useless skill that the school was forcing upon me. Plus, it had the added downside of being something the teacher would deduct points for not doing well, so another reason to dislike it. A useless skill that I would always suck at and would bring down my grades. Yippie!
It would have been much more fun to learn cursive if the teacher had talked in a pirate voice. Well, maybe not, arrrr.
It’s not merely knowing how to type. Assignments have to be turned in typed (or as a PDF, whatever goes today). Which implies proper margins, bibliographic references, etc., that the student needs to know not only what they are, but how to set them up in a word processor, etc etc.
Yes, all of that. That’s why we were required to know how to type. And we were expected to be able to turn in a properly formatted paper. They did teach us, in the first year (trimester, even), how to assemble a bibliography, how to cite stuff, all that.
I’m assuming they do the same today, but the tools are different. No more typewriters.
My own children are far too young for high school. Although the oldest, at seven, is perhaps not the fastest typist in the world, but generally knows her way around a keyboard.
That was the received wisdom when I learned cursive, but as noted upthread, there’s little evidence for it. Based on personal experience I don’t believe that to be the case. Though a mix can absorb the fastest aspects of both, I don’t think the differences are very large.
DPRK: British joined up writing doesn’t have the idiocies of Palmer and its variants, and I suspect it’s easier to learn as well. I’ve never tried it, but I could imagine someone who opposed cursive in the US, but supported joined-up-writing in the UK.
I think cursive’s faster for at least most of those who are really in practice at it. It’s slower if you’re less in practice at it than you are at printing. I suppose it might also be slower if you’re using a highly complicated version of cursive and a simple version of printing.
Well, it’s also slower for those of us who have terrible manual dexterity. At least, legible cursive is.
There’s a bit of selection bias at work here too I think - those of us who find it’s just not giving us any value tend to drop out of the system once we’re allowed to, hence grow into adults who ‘aren’t in practise’ at cursive. But not being in practise is an effect of being crap at it, rather than a cause.
Yes, that and the fact that people who get faster in writing attribute it to their writing style rather than sheer practice. Which can be addressed with a properly constructed scientific study.
I think the selection bias is a good point. I remember spending hours struggling with cursive, but that’s my own bias for remembering something I hated in elementary school. I’m sure it didn’t dominate my elementary school education, it was just the one thing I truly hated. Being told to go read was easy as I was way above my grade level.
Sigh… we had a mom who would threaten legal action against the school if her darling boy got a final grade below a C. And of course the college administration would run around scared of a lawsuit and convene multiple meetings. The “I can’t legally discuss this” worked with other parents, just not Litigious Mom.
Oh, one of those classes was typography, which included learning/practicing/customizing… cursive! See, suddenly the tangent’s back on topic!
Oh, when I was introducing cursive (and the students were calling it “Grandma Code That Millennials Can’t Read”), I told them “It’s good for your brain to learn a new language.”
Now, are they still teaching core skills like pen twirling? I suppose it can be done with a smartphone instead, but the resulting damage is likely to be much more expensive.
My point is that it is how people make notes. The idea that “writing” is the only way to make notes is false.