I use cursive writing for my signature. My normal handwriting is a combination of cursive and printing.
Kids spend way more time, collectively, in recess, or playing dodgeball or steal the bacon or duck-duck goose than they do learning cursive. Shall we say America is wasting trillions of dollars on childrens’ games?
“Look at the size of this number!” is not a good way to evaluate the worth of a program.
When I was a kid (and when my kids were in elementary school) printing was taught before cursive. Did your kids learn cursive first? Printing is taught in a standard way also.
What aspects of learning are built upon learning to write cursive, as opposed to print? The only thing I can think of is an artistic pleasure of beautiful penmanship.
The only purpose of cursive is to be able to write faster over printing. Other than that, it tends to be less legible and is unnecessary to learn if you just want to learn the alphabet and spelling.
Generally the speed gain of cursive (for those who do have a gain) is at the expense of legibility. So there’s little advantage there. And if the only reason to teach cursive these days is so that people can read mostly illegible cursive, then you’re just helping to continue a vicious cycle. And if it’s just so people can sign in cursive, then as The Flying Dutchman pointed out, it’s rather a waste of time and money.
In modern day, for the amount of hand writing we do, I would see a lot more benefit in focussing on legible writing. Certainly it will make college students a lot happier in thirty years, when they have to decipher what the teacher just plopped up there.
I’m actually going to subscribe to this thread, a first for me, as it hits rather close to home.
When I was in elementary school, in Great Falls Montana, they were apparently trying an experiment.
We did printing, as normal, until about 2nd grade. Maybe 3rd. But after that, we started learning how to write “Cursive Italic”. This was done in all public schools in Great Falls, as I changed schools every year until 7th grade.
Cursive Italic is a hybrid form, a little bit of cursive, and a little bit of printing. Some letters connected, usually ones that had (what I now know) is a serif… lower case m could connect to lower case r (which looked pretty much exactly like the lower case “r” right there, but the veritical line would be topped with a curve to the left). And so forth. I’ll see if I can find some sample online, or if worse comes to worse, I’ll do some and then take a pic.
Fortnately for me, Mrs. Livingston in 6th grade took pity on all of us, and taught us how to read cursive. Good thing too…
In 7th grade, I moved to California. There, I tried to learn cursive. I tried really hard. I failed. I couldn’t get it.
To this day, I print. I don’t use the Cursive Italic, I don’t write in cursive. I print.
My signature is essentially a scribble. I don’t even make a pretense of a letter beyond the “R” and “B” that make up my initials.
In the beginning, I was taught to print. I could print, print quickly, and print legibly. This was good.
Then, they taught me to write in cursive. My regular handwriting immidiately went straight to hell, as I automatically incorporated the loose, sloppy, don’t bother-lifting-the-pencil cursive style into my normal writing, including the random use of cursive or cursive letters when it seemed easier. Nothing has improved in the intervening years and my handwriting is still something that I myself have a difficult time reading; it is still clear by looking at it that the damage was done by the incorporation of cursive into it.
I can’t say I would see the harm in removing cursive from the curriculum. Let it be learned later as an archaic style for recognition purposes, but not as something to be written in.
Actually, a bit of both - their school has a script that initially consists of printing individual cursive letters with ‘tails’ - from this, they just naturally end up joining them together. I have no complaints.
In the particular context I’m considering here, it just results in pleasantly readable handwriting that tends to be quite consistent across the class - so that differences in style don’t become a distraction or hindrance to the appreciation and evaluation of the actual written content by both teachers and peers.
If the teacher can read the work without hindrance, the focus can concentrate on spelling, grammar, content (factual and otherwise), etc.
if the pupils can read the work of their peers without hindrance, there can be crosstalk/synergy of ideas, concepts, styles…
I suppose it could be done just as well by imposing some other, non-cursive standard, although this one seems to work quite well, so why fix what isn’t broken?
Me too
My parents saved a lot of my work and letters. I wrote beautifully by the age of 11, but from there on my penmanship gradually worsened so by the time I was late in high school I switched back over to printing without any problems at all. The main reason was, come exam time I could no longer read my own writing. Now at the age of 56, I can no longer write cursively at all
Why not accomplish that goal by teaching them to type? Typing is actually a necessary skill in the working world, unlike legible handwriting.
Pencils and paper are easier on the school budget? Not to mention reasonable to expect the parents to supply.
Also (and setting aside my visceral horror at the idea of *not bothering to teach kids to write by hand), I think there are going to be situations in which writing is necessary in the working/adult world for some time to come; we still don’t have the paperless office that computers were promised to herald; I don’t think we’re going to have the pen-and-paper-less world any time soon either.
Typing is such a necessary skill these days, though, I really don’t think we should let kids get through school without learning it. The kid who doesn’t learn to type in school is going to be at a huge disadvantage in later life, much more so than someone who doesn’t learn to write cursive.
When I have to write something that someone else will have to read, I print, as do all of my colleagues. Nobody’s saying we shouldn’t teach kids to print- just that we shouldn’t be teaching cursive, or shouldn’t be spending so much time on it.
What school did you go to where you never had to type a paper? They DO learn to type. What do you think we do on the internet all day?
I never had to take a typing class and learn to touch-type and type quickly (I graduated from high school in 1993). I did take one, and I think it’s one of the few useful classes I took in high school. When I was a teaching assistant at UC Santa Cruz in 1999-2000, I had several students who complained that they couldn’t type very well or very fast. I think learning to touch-type at a good speed is a much more useful skill than learning to write or read cursive, and schools should acknowledge that fact.
I’m trying to remember the last time I saw cursive writing. It’s been at least 5 years.
In fifth grade, they put all the “fast learners” in a typing class while the other kids worked on math. That small thing gave us a huge advantage later in middle school, when everyone was expected to take it. I think I even got a “fastest typist” award at the end of the 7th grade. It was probably the only award I got that year.
In contrast, my very first C on a report card was earned in second grade penmanship. And you can see why.
So maybe I won’t be too sad if they get rid of penmanship after all. 
I don’t know about that. I’ve run across a few doctors in my day who could have used that little bit of extra education in legible handwriting. 
I suppose we might as well not teach kids arithmetic as they’ll just be using calculators in real life.
We can also forget spelling as they’ll have smell checkers. :-}
Admittedly my handwriting is now awful, as I seldom write longhand, but the idea of not teaching kids such a basic skill is distinctly worrying.
born in 61, did a combo of private and public schools. I can write in perfect copperplate cursive, print in regular or italic, do regular ‘modern’ cursive and thanks to aninterest in the middle ages, many different hand printed fonts ranging from a roman clerks printing to german fraktur to several other decorative forms ranging from celtic to carolingian cypher. I* am currently trying to find a source for a particularly funky sort of german semi cursive style from the 1800s and very early 1900s.
I was one of those that the nuns tried to make right handed so I have to make especially certain i am writing legibly. I can also write cursive backwards=)
When I was in Elementary school (not so long ago), we learned to print our letters in first grade and learned to write cursive letters in third grade. The problem then became that by fifth grade, all our teachers wanted us to print all of our assignments, so we all switched back to printing.
Now, being the smart kid in class, I realized (when a teacher refused to use printing in middle school) that the “dumb kids” couldn’t read cursive well. I suddenly had a solution to people glancing over and copying my work without a constant cover up operation with another sheet of paper. I’ve been writing in cursive ever since (with the exception of when I teach). I use a hybrid style that my students can read with a few letters connected to save effort.
I say that we could drop penmanship from our curriculum with the argument that students will be typing in real life and for most of their assignments. However, the problem (that someone else already mentioned) is that not every student has daily access to a computer to type their assignments. Just as not every one of my algebra students has a calcluator, they need to be able to perform simple tasks like writing the answer to a question or calculating simple arithmetic without the use of computers. (If you’ve ever gone shopping when the computers are down, you’ll understand why.)