You do that when learning printing, and learning printing is needed, to fill out forms and the like.
Exactly. Why spend years teaching a obsolescent skill? Why not teach keyboarding instead?
I mean, calligraphy, Greek and such are all interesting and sometimes useful skills they used to teach, but since “Johnny can’t read”, maybe USA schools need to concentrate on the basics.
Hey maybe teach the kids how to do a 1040EZ, balance a checkbook. Read with a degree of skepticism.
Technology will take care of that.
And they can take notes with printing.
This thread reminds me of my fascination with the Sütterlin script, a type of handwriting from Germany. I found it intriguing because the handwritten letters often bear little resemblance to their printed counterparts. I briefly entertained the idea of learning to write in this script but I discarded it when I realized almost nobody would be able to read my writing.
Read more about it here:
Sure, absolutely.
But once in a while, you’re in the middle of nowhere. Batteries dead. No cell service. Or internet. Then what?
Funny. I have a relative who was (now retired) a military pilot. And the technology is amazing. But the service still requires a working knowledge of navigation without relying on technology. He’s really good at trigonometry, and other stuff needed to, say, navigate an airplane back to the deck of a carrier, at night, with damaged instruments and a non-functioning computer. “Technology will take care of that” is apparently not something that the military counts on.
We call that “printing”.
Meetings between us and Chinese supplier routinely recorded by multiple individuals on the Chinese side.
Also, our kids routinely 'take notes" by photographing. Why bother to write anything down. Also… youngest doesn’t even type. Routinely questions google by voice.
My HELP or SOS is going to be printed, not in cursive. I want people to be able to read it.
That’s great. It’s not true that every meeting can be recorded, but some can. That’s great.
Photographing what? Unless they’re photographing someone else’s notes, how are photographs notes?
In my (pre-COVID) college courses, many of my classmates frequently photographed the whiteboard filled with instructor’s notes before they were erased. In fact, Microsoft’s Lens app even has a whiteboard function specifically geared for photographing whiteboards.
As I said, photographing someone else’s notes.
That’s fine. I really don’t care anymore.
I think cursive is a useful skill. I do not comprehend the opposition to the acquisition of this skill. That said, I don’t care. My kids will learn it. I think that’s good. That’s all.
Yes, the thread is general, not specifically about you.
A general purpose of notes is to record facts. Sometime facts like “I need to buy oatmeal” (picture of box), or “doctors appointment at 11:15” (scheduler), or instructions (recording) Kids use the technology, and they’ve got a major coverage of the notes you need to take, without any use of cursive.
I wonder whether a little cursive (enough so they can sign their name and read it) coupled with keyboarding, origami, and maybe technical drawing would be a useful break from reading, writing, and math.
When I wrote solely in cursive, my junior high teachers found it difficult to read. Writing in print resolved the issue.
I currently write with a mix of cursive and print. It’s more legible than average which is ironic as I once received a C in penmanship. I’m glad cursive is dying out: it’s unfortunate that it took so long for us to figure out that it’s well matched to quill and fountain pen technology, but not so much to ball point or pencil.
One odd thing is that while Palmer is taught a lot, I see little of it in the wild. People use print for most capital letters and Palmer’s F and G are pointless while their Q is just bizarre.
The Q is absurd. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen it in the wild.
If you can imagine the left-hand side of the arch in the upper-case Q coming down a bit, you might notice it almost forms a closed loop with the ‘tail’ that drops down to the right, giving it something of a resemblance to a block letter Q. Having said that, I’ve spent the majority of my life thinking it’s just a 2.
Let us take a moment to recall that the much more important underlying question is whether students are still taught to write at all, and not whether the model they are forced to copy from is by Palmer or Spencer or whomever. In Billingsley’s The Pen’s Excellencie at least half a dozen different styles are presented, some of them more joined up, some less. Same for A Booke Containing Diuerse Sorts of Hands.
If Johnny can’t write, we cannot immediately lay the blame at the feet of Austin Palmer any more than New Math is responsible for problems with his sums.
That said, back on topic, the title of this thread presumes that teaching “cursive” is not the default, but to what extent is that true?
According to statements on this page,
-
all non-English-speaking European countries (+ Russia) (except Finland): five-year-olds begin with cursive, and no other system of writing is ever taught [so we see the bias inherent in the thread title!]
-
Finland: no cursive, typing is formally taught
-
UK, Australia: cursive
-
Canada: cursive in Ontario, not in Québec
-
South Africa: part of the official curriculum
-
North Africa, Middle East, Arabia: cursive
-
South America, Central America: cursive, natch.
-
Japan: the page is not clear but hints that calligraphy is not a “priority”
We are still missing data from a huge number of people in India, Indonesia, etc., let alone China, but if you were not taught joined-up writing in school you may still be in the global minority…
I find this claim very hard to believe (I know it’s not @DPRKs claim, that’s just the compendium of thread positions)
I can’t imagine what the writing of kids at this stage of learning would look like if you were trying to teach them joined up writing as their very first exercise in letter formation, and I suspect people simply forget about this stage of their learning, because it was a very early one.
I can imagine some systems start with “running writing” as we used to call it earlier than others though
I was always in trouble for atrocious penmanship in primary school 
But, to quote from @Dr.Strangelove 's paper:
If need be, we can look up the actual official syllabi for France, Spain, Italy, Romania, etc., but what I glean from this is that (at least in France) only running writing is taught (or acceptable) in the first years of elementary school. It is still plausible that the “very first exercise in letter formation” in pre-school is not focused on joined letters, but the article does not go into any further detail.
Spanish Wikipedia says that some children’s handwriting continuously develops without clearly delimited phases, but that for others there is a “pre-writing” (4 to 6 years of age) phase, then a “pre-calligraphic” phase (6 to 9 years) characterized by slow, insecure, not joined, not following the margins and rules, etc., then a “calligraphic” phase (10–12 years), and a “maturation” phase (12–16 years) during which speed at the expense of clarity, complicated ligatures and illegibility of individual letters begin to appear, and the child’s writing continues to mature until 18 to 20 years of age.
At the “pre-writing” stage, the students are still getting used to the basic strokes and features of the letters.
Well, sure. I didn’t really think it was devoted to me. But, like everyone else in the thread, I have some thoughts on the matter.
I don’t doubt that kids “take notes” using a camera. I do it too, on occasion. Always having a camera (and a recorder) in one’s pocket is really useful sometimes.
My point is that that’s just making a copy of someone else’s notes, not making notes. Someone, a kid or an adult, might wish to also record their own thoughts in the moment. Writing (whether printing or cursive) is a handy technique for doing that.
I don’t think believing that amounts to thinking the thread is about me.
I also think, when it’s taught and learned properly, cursive allows faster writing than printing. Clearly many this thread disagree (surprisingly vehemently) with me. Nonetheless, I don’t think that’s making it all about me.
Judging by some posts above, the belief that cursive is dead, or should be permitted to die out, is not universally held around the world.
My children are being taught cursive. Or at least my oldest child will be taught cursive in school starting this coming September. I’m happy with that. Who knows what the future holds, given the apparent resistance (until now unknown to me) to teaching cursive.