I remember learning cursive in elementary school and even had some teachers who required that all assignments be written in cursive or they wouldn’t be accepted, with the exception of a few longer writing assignments that were allowed to be printed. I’m young enough that using a word processor and printing it up at home was always an option, and even for those who may not have had a computer at home, there was always the computer lab at school or public library as an option.
The justification I always got for why they insisted always seemed to be in relation to hand-printing and never in comparison to typing. They claimed it was faster, though I never felt comfortable enough with it that I could say it was clearly faster, and so my writing would be better because I’d better be able to keep up with my thoughts. The other thing I heard was that picking up the pen and setting it down also served as a way of interupting my thoughts and would lead to fattigue. So, even if we accept those arguments as valid, fine, cursive is better than printing, but that doesn’t compare to typing. Someone who has received similar instruction in both cursive and typing will undoubtedly be significantly faster typing, which blows away any supposed stream-of-consciousness argument. And I also find typing to be a lot less fatiguing than hand-writing as well.
For reasons I wasn’t told, I could imagine seeing just the idea of learning a skill and putting in that practice as a good cognitive benefit, but I don’t see why cursive, or any form of writing for that matter, is a necessary component. Why can’t I learn that sort of methodology through practice math problems, vocabulary, science, or whatever else?
I can still read reasonable cursive just fine, but generally printing is easier and, of course, typed is markedly better than both. Considering that I never had good handwriting, when I do have to write by hand, which is rare, legibility is the most important part. So, it seems to me that all cursive is really good for anymore is in creating a signature, but even that is on the way out with a lot of modern and near-future technology.
So, to me, whatever supposed cognitive benefit there is in cursive is completely drowned by the benefits of typing, in that it’s everywhere, it’s faster, it’s more legible. To me, the greatest cognitive benefit is being able to, as efficiently and effectively as possible, take a thought from my head onto a piece of paper or a screen, and typing wins that by huge margin. Also considering that typing is probably easier and faster to learn and an essential skill in the modern world anyway, I don’t see the point. For several years in elementary school, we would spent probably an hour a day on cursive; it has to be a pretty big benefit to still be worth that kind of investment today.
