I learned cursive back in the Dark Ages, but over the ensuing decades I’ve developed a writing style that combines cursive with printing. Since I’m a proofreader who provides my corrections via pdf files of the correction pages it has to be easily readable, and I’ve had no complaints.
In which case they can learn it. There are all sorts of useful skills we could teach, but I’d put reading standard musical notation ahead of reading cursive.
Many people do, but often what results is that people end up with a quasi-cursive script, or even a kind of shorthand, which might make sense to them and nobody else. Which is fine when you’re taking notes, because nobody else needs to read them. It might even be useful if you’re writing something you don’t want someone else to read.
Me, I always found cursive to be a pain in the ass, because when you’re taught cursive, you are taught to do it correctly. This letter looks like this, and has this kind of loop, and curves this way, and so on. So every time I write it, I’m carefully drawing each letter, sometimes pausing to try to remember how another letter goes, adding a fancy little flourish or tail or whatever, because that’s how it’s supposed to be done. That’s probably my biggest issue with it; you’re not writing letters, you’re drawing them.
You print when you want something that conveys information. You write cursive when you want to impress someone.
That’s not cursive, that’s your own form of printing, and it works for you well. And if you’re able to write it legibly, then that just means you have a very efficient and very nice style of handwriting. I don’t know that drilling into a person the proper ways to write every letter of the alphabet, and making them practice them over and over again is necessary to develop something like that. You can introduce those ideas when you’re first teaching kids how to write. In fact, that’s the best time to do it, as they are developing habits that they might have the rest of their lives.
I consider it cursive-based at the least since I connect letters when that flows easily, separate them when it doesn’t. I don’t worry about how rigidly correct my letter forms are in the process. And I confess a fondness for swash, especially in my capital letters, and the lower-case y’s and g’s.
What definition of “cursive” are you using?
Wikipedia says
Formal cursive, which is what they used to teach in school. That’s the only kind relevant to the discussion of teaching cursive in school, obviously.
Informal cursive developed as a part of learning how to write is potentially very useful, and isn’t going to go away if formal cursive isn’t taught.
For the purposes of this thread, the style doesn’t matter: I don’t care if you call it “printing”; the question is, can you write it fast enough to take notes during a lecture? Are kids taught writing-based brainstorming, study, and composition skills?
Generally penmanship is taught based on imitating some kind of sample. I personally do not recall ever being expected to “print” lower-case letters (and to this day cannot really do it), but if it was some kind of “formal” cursive I pretty much ignored that from the very beginning 
[aside: sometimes, more than one style is taught. A beginner’s Arabic textbook had Naskh script, but later you are taught Ruqʿah, which is the cursive style everyone actually uses. Similarly, Chinese characters are introduced in the “regular script” but everybody writes in a “running script”]
Only question is, whatever it is they do teach in school, is it facilitating the kids’ studies, or crippling them (by being too slow, fatiguing, or illegible)?
I guess for the purposes of this thread, what matters is what they “should” be teaching in school that they aren’t. My only exposure to teaching cursive is formal cursive, and I’ve never heard of any other kind of cursive being taught. I recall another thread some time ago on this board where people were asked if they were taught cursive, and every comment from American posters who were taught cursive in school seemed to have similar experiences, so I assume it was pretty standard when it was taught.
Now, if @ThelmaLou wants to clarify what kind of cursive is supposed to be taught, which now isn’t, and which is leading inexorably to children lacking important skills in life, then maybe that would help matters.
But my understanding is that when cursive was taught, there was a way it was taught, and informal styles that were developed independently are not relevant.
What they were teaching in school was slow and fatiguing and wasn’t facilitating anything other than being able to write it. As for whether or not it was legible, that depends on how good the writer was, or disciplined at it, and how familiar the reader was with it.
It strikes me as being pretty anti-progressive to gripe about its absence in schools.
Off the top of my head, the type of 20th-century American handwriting you are thinking of is, or is based upon, Mills and Palmer-style business hands that were designed for rapid, legible writing that could be sustained for long periods, explicitly foregoing or eschewing ornamentation, shading, and flourishing.
So it was explicitly supposed to be the opposite of “slow and fatiguing”. As for what transpired in practice, that can only be answered by experienced schoolteachers who have seen a lot of kids come and go; I do not see my or your personal experience as especially relevant, since each of us will have found what works best for him or her but individual experiences do not paint an overall picture.
Since we got on the subject of cursive, and there are some people who are obsessed with the “trophies for everyone” thing, I once saw a large, very fancy certificate in a nice wood frame, from about 100 years ago.
What had this youngster accomplished? She had passed her Palmer cursive writing test.
This looks exactly like what I was taught in the 80s.
Plenty of ornamentation, little curly-cues, etc. Very inefficient. Printing is much easier and faster for me.
That may have more to do with things like how and when you were taught printing vs cursive and how much practice you’ve had with each than with their inherent ease and efficiency.
Speaking for myself, whenever I write something for only myself to read, at least if it’s longer than just a few words, I’ll write it in cursive (though maybe not “formal cursive”)—I find that significantly faster and easier than printing paragraphs’ worth of text.
But another consideration is that cursive handwriting predates the widespread availability of ballpoint pens. I suspect that the advantages of cursive over printing would be more noticeable if you were writing with a fountain pen or dip pen, but I don’t know because I’ve never used one.
I think some of what you call “little curly-cues” are the loops and strokes that are there, not for ornamentation, but to facilitate writing words smoothly and flowingly without lifting your pen from the paper.
They aren’t. Look at that alphabet, they are unnecessary loops. Not all cursive is like that, I found other alphabets that don’t have them.
Here’s an example:
So clearly there are variations that might be a little more superfluous. I don’t question that. Those are minor differences, but as you are writing a lot they do matter.
No question, it will be better for some people than others. But there is just not enough of a benefit to add a second writing style for students in a digital age. It’s hit or miss whether it improves writing, some studies say it does, many say it doesn’t. But taking up lesson time for it just doesn’t seem justified.
There’s a reason why it’s being dropped, and it’s not because of some conservative plot to brainwash kids.
Are you sure that award was for a child? A hundred or more years ago, good handwriting was a necessary skill for many office jobs. So perhaps this was something one could show to a prospective employer? Sort of like the present-day certifications some people get for knowing programming or other computer skills.
This thread has officially turned into an Andy Rooney commentary.
It starts as an attack on Education itself.
And end with a “debate” on Cursive.
Yep! I learned that in the 80s. Needlessly ornamental. We’ve had plenty of threads here about curvsive, and nobody is willing to budge. (Even when learning that studies don’t unequivocally show cursive is faster than printing.) I grew up with cursive and largely found the emphasis on it a waste of time, better spent doing something else. Give the kids a brief primer, if you must, and get on to other things. Print is fine. I myself use a print-writing blend that I find more efficient than pure cursive or printing.
If I want to write really fast, I use Stenoscript ABC shorthand – a very simple shorthand that is based on letters and regular punctuation, for the most part. Can be done in printing, cursive, hell, a typewriter. Plus you can modify it your way with your own symbols or shorthands as you wish. It incorporates really well with that, without having to get into Gregg or Pitman shorthand.
But I wouldn’t push teaching that, either. Most of this type of educational carping to me comes off as “wah, wah … they did this differently when I was a kid, so it must be bad/a sign of slipping standards” etc. Feh. That’s not my observation with my kids. They are in two different school systems (one public, one private) and both are beyond what I was learning at their age, and they’ve been thought more flexible/additional methods of reasoning (as in a lot of their math.)
And, yeah, they did get a few lectures in cursive, but nothing like a full- or half-year class.
I recently stumbled on an old book report I wrote in junior high, and I was surprised at how readable my cursive was. What I remember in school is my cursive being hard to read when I wrote quickly, and that I started to write more quickly after I got out of elementary school.
Speaking of my elementary school: it barely had a library. It was just a room that students were allowed to go into, one at a time, that had books we could check out and a single computer (an Apple II). Even before I started using the computer, I remember getting in trouble for spending too much time in the library.
By high school, I remember it mostly being the place where I would use the Internet or do research. There were a lot of books, but not a lot I cared about. And in college, I never looked at the books at all. The library I actually used for books was the town library.
Saying all that, I still think this is a monumentally stupid idea, and frankly wonder why they didn’t already have these rooms in their schools. I know my school did. You went to this other room where you’d do work as part of “in schools suspension.” I never got it, but I knew people who did.
If they did already have those rooms, then the need to have far more of them says a lot about disciplinary problems at the school.
And, as I explained, I do not know how to print (though I suppose I could try to imitate a particular typeface if you plop a book in front of me) in the sense you are describing except I do have a good capitalis monumentalis I bring out when appropriate, not for rapidity of execution though. Whose experience is more valid? I have had a lot of papers go through my hands and never paid much attention to the handwriting, as long as it was legible.
I know an old-school secretary whose job requirements included both shorthand and typing at a (pretty high) speed. Whether any of that is useful for general schoolwork… typing is required to complete assignments, though speed is not a factor. Sometimes people take notes by typing on a laptop and then it does matter.
This seems more relevant: schools without a library or librarian, schools with underfunded libraries, students discouraged from using the library (as opposed to, you know, teaching them general study skills, library skills, and Internet research skills). Taking away the books and teachers. Students “getting in trouble” for hanging out in the library.
I seem to have left a misleading impression. My elementary school and my high school are not in any connected. I went to a Montessori school, and it didn’t have the type of library that public schools do. And of course I would get in trouble for staying too long in there, since the only time you could go is during the school day, and I would effectively be skipping class. While Montessori schools do very much push self-learning, I was neglecting other stuff I should have finished.
Once I changed to public school, we had librarians, and I was taught how to research in middle school. But that’s research, not going to the library to read and enjoy myself. But I also graduated in 2003, so, by high school, I could search so many print resources on the computer. Most of the time, the full text was available in some archive, but occasionally you’d still have to go find a physical book. But you found that book using the computer.
What I don’t remember using the school library for was regular reading. In theory I could have, but I don’t remember ever doing so. I was a tech nerd, and there were so many computers available that I could usually get on one or the other. I would get my fun books from the public library.
My point in bringing it up my elementary school library was to show how much I loved the library. I spend enough time in it to get in trouble for skipping class. The rest just kinda got away from me, reminiscing.
I actually find myself wondering what school libraries look like today. What is the ratio between the computers and the actual space for books? Maybe they have more room for pleasurable reading.
The one thing I can’t see is why you need to make ISS bigger if this guy is actually running schools well.