Nobody is suggesting cause and effect–and if there is one, it goes the other way. I’m really bad at multiplying with Roman numerals, and I think multiplying with Roman numerals is worthless. The cause-and-effect relationship is this: because I think such multiplication is worthless, I’ve never developed that skill.
The arguments for the worthlessness of cursive relate to best practices. What are the best uses of a student’s time? There are very good reasons to think that teaching students to write in cursive is not among them, given alternatives such as teaching students preliminary coding skills, teaching students more about how government works, teaching students to speak a foreign language, teaching students to analyze media messages, teaching students to knit, or myriad other skills that are undertaught in a lot of schools.
Not really, no, except inasmuch as arts education is important. I’m unconvinced cursive belongs in a curriculum even as much as a branch of art like knitting does.
Oddly enough, you bring one of the few positive context for teaching anything resembling cursive: calligraphy. An art form related to cursive like fine painting is related to brush-painting large buildings. An artistic reason to do something that would otherwise make absolutely no practical sense and efficiently fulfills no common need.
I studied calligraphy. I enjoyed it. I would never confuse it with a practical tool for communications, other than in the greater sense that art is a means of communication.
Well, this English major, at least, who does use cursive or a cursive hybrid in his note-taking (and stenoscript shorthand, too!) thinks teaching cursive is a waste of time that can be better spent on other things. I have two daughters, not of school age yet, but I personally hope they don’t waste time teaching cursive in their classes. I do think there is some value in being made familiar with it, in order to read it, but spending too much time learning how to write it, in my opinion, would be time better spent on other things.
Typing on a manual typewriter is a completely different skill from computer keyboarding. My son, when confronted with a typewriter, was mystified as to how to get paper into it. He also didn’t know what to do when he got to the end of the line. And mistakes were forever. It was useless as anything but a blunt instrument, as far as he was concerned. But then he discovered a book of concrete poetry, and after that, couldn’t wait for another crack at Grandma’s typewriter. However, for practical matters, he still has little use for it, kinda like how the wind-up record player is fun once in a while, but not really something you go to for a serious music experience.
Or let them have freaking recess, which is an endangered species in many school districts. Taking ten minutes out of each day not to learn cursive, and to spend on the playground instead sounds like a good use of time to me.
Which is an unfounded stipulation. Actually, the better we are at something, the less brain activity we have when we do it. Someone who is 60, and has been writing cursive since winning the penmanship medal in 1965, and maybe writes a lot for work, so really gets some practice at it probably hardly thinks about it at all when writing, and has very little light up on a brain scan. All those scans of children’s brains mean is that this is a new skill for them. If we re talking about something like 2nd graders, you probably get the same thing when they read out loud, but a veteran teach reading out loud probably has little activity. Heck, a baby probably has the lights going off when watching television, something that causes near-black outs in most people’s brains.
I had an ancient professor when I was an English major who used to gripe that English majors didn’t have to learn Old English anymore, like he did. We used to joke that it was probably his first language. Actually, my school didn’t even offer it as an elective. I might have taken it.
You think it’s a waste of time to learn a skill that you use yourself? Interesting. Do you wish that you were unable to write cursive, and had better spent that time?
Yes. I wish I had been taught typing at that time, but I was teaching myself with a manual typewriter (through no fault of my own–my aunt had one and I just thought it was cool, not realizing the utility of learning typing that would come.) This was early 80s, so computers weren’t really everyday objects quite yet. I do not feel I would have suffered from not knowing cursive. Right now, given a choice between my daughter(s) learning cursive vs. pretty much anything else, I’d rather the time be spent on the pretty much anything else.
I, too, know an algorithm for doing arithmetic with Roman numerals. The first step of that algorithm is to convert them all to place value numerals, and the last step is to convert them back.
My friend is a huge proponent of cursive because without it “kids won’t be able to read historical documents when they get older.” I find this argument tenuous for many reasons:
[ul]
[li] Reading cursive isn’t that difficult, and stylized cursive fonts will remain (e.g. for fancy restaurant logos) so they won’t be entirely foreign.[/li][li] Plenty of languages have gone through more drastic spelling or writing reforms and people can either read old documents, or at least if they want to it’s nowhere near learning a whole new language (with some exceptions for really old documents, it takes some effort to learn to read really, really old Japanese phonetically regardless of your background). [/li][li] Professional historians aren’t going to disappear, and those specializing in Anglo countries will learn how to read it.[/li][li] The vast majority of old documents will be or have been translated to a typed-up format anyway. This is only really an issue if someone discovers, say, old letters in their grandma’s attic. And even then, see the other points.[/li][li] The biggest problem with reading old texts is always going to be contemporary quirks of language (slang, ways of wording things, references to then-current events), not the penmanship or font. Well, that or the texts being partially missing or destroyed.[/li][li] Regardless of the other points, optical character recognition is very good and quickly becoming better, if we’re not there we’re probably not far off from having computers able to transliterate it to a font close enough for humans to read even if there are some minor errors.[/li][/ul]
I hated taking cursive in school. I had remedial handwriting in 7th grade! But now I use it every day to write in my diary and also to write my parents once a week.
I can’t find a link, but I read a newspaper article weeks ago about a city council somewhere (New York, maybe?) which was upset to discover that cursive wasn’t taught in that city’s schools anymore. (The headline was something like “City’s Schools Not Teaching Writing!”) One council member stood and threatened to teach his kids cursive at home. That’ll show those teachers!
Nevertheless, time spent on cursive is time not spent on something else. Having justification for teaching cursive is not enough. The justification has to be better than all the other things that might have been taught.
