What about when there’s no paper? What about when there’s no writing utensil? Obviously, the written word is a bust and he must learn to create a memory palace! Books burn, but memory is forever golden.
Being able to write in cursive is a neat trick, but it isn’t required and it does take valuable time away from useful things. Having a legible printing hand and being a fast typist are orders of magnitude more useful and, let’s face it, most people’s cursive hand is ugly and pretty much worthless to anyone who isn’t exposed to it on a regular basis. Despite knowing and seeing many of them often, the cursive hands of my older relatives are a mysterious scrawl until I’ve poured significant energy into deciphering them based on guessed letterforms and context.
Secondly, cursive is not always faster: What is faster is what is practiced, and neither is inherently faster than the other. (As a side note, if taking notes quickly is the only desiderata, invest in a copy of the Gregg Shorthand and have him practice that. Better, invest in a cheap audio recorder and have him use that.) In fact, typing can be faster than either if that is what is practiced the most.
Thirdly, it is dying due to network effects: As fewer people are able to read cursive, its utility as a method of communication degrades quadratically. Metcalfe’s Law works in both directions. After a relatively brief period of this kind of decay, its utility is low enough as to preclude any use whatsoever.
I still think he should learn to read cursive because the utility of creating new works in a medium is only loosely related to the continuing utility of older works in that medium (black and white movies were not immediately rendered worthless when black and white film was) and because he’s likely to have an aunt or a grandmother who has forgotten how to print and only knows cursive (happened to my grandmother). Learning to write in cursive, however, is a waste and encourages the notion that schools are places where you learn useless skills for no reason.
Is cursvie really all that rare in the US, or is this another oddity of the SDMB? Everybody who I know writes in cursive. When faced with a written handwritten document, all in printed letters, I can’t help but think that the author is undereducated or a bit childish.
I’ve got to ask, though, how it’s even possible for somebody to write faster in block capitals, rather than cursive, as some are suggesting here. Are you mistaking a particular style of handwriting, that you learned in school, for all cursive handwriting?
I’m similarly bewildered - by ‘cursive’ is everyone meaning what UKans would call ‘joined-up handwriting’ or does it mean something truly archaic, like copperplate writing?
I took it to mean joined-up writing; I certainly can’t imagine them trying to teach that spidery Copperplate handwriting to kids in the 21st century. It’s hard enough to read (especially when it was written a century ago), never mind teach to 8 year olds…
The reason cursive is dying is that it’s a slower way to record and communicate.
Looking at your examples of things we should all presumably learn:
woodworking is a fun thing to do (like pottery). But why should you spend any time on it if you don’t want to?
being able to fix your own car involves a huge amount of time. You can’t skimp on it, because a mistake could kill you. Just learning to change a tyre could save you time, but why go to all the trouble of studying the combustion engine? leave it to professionals.
small repairs is a similar case. Knowing how to change a light bulb is fine; rewiring the house is complicated and risky. I’d rather spend the time earning money and finding a decent contracter.
No offense, but I want to kill you. Completely irrational. Something about this makes a red haze appear in my vision.
Those of you who think cursive is slower to write and less legible than printing – the problem isn’t cursive, the problem is that you suck at it. Proper cursive – not calligraphy or Copperplate, just “joined-up writing” – is faster than printing and perfectly legible. (Unless you have an MD; that’s one stereotype that I’ve seen confirmed in the real world over and over.)
I teach AP English. Kids that write cursive do not perform better than kids that print, and I’ve even been known to tell a kid to print when their cursive was totally illegible.
I’m not saying it’s totally useless–nothing is–but when a kid is in school full time, a parent only has so many chances to say “Ok, you are going to sit down and we are going to learn this” about something the kid has no interest in (things the kid is interested in is a different story). I just think that there are a million things that would be of more use than cursive.
But how often do you need to write that quickly? I can take notes in my own short hand as quickly as anyone can talk, if I am brainstorming ideas I am not going any faster than I can print, and if I am working on the final draft of something (which may go more quickly), I am certainly typing. There have been a handful of times in my life where it would have been really cool to have beautiful cursive handwriting, but there have been more times in my life where it would have been cool to know how to replace an alternator, or how to make pie crust, or how to replace a hard drive. The question isn’t “is this valuable?” It’s “Of all the things you want to teach your child, how far down is this on the list?”
And while good cursive may be as legible as good printing, lousy cursive is much more illegible than lousy printing.
Abso-fucking-lutely. The problem IS that I suck at it. I sucked at it when I started in second grade, I continued to suck at it for the next four years of primary school, and it still looked like a demented spider when I gleefully gave it up in high school.
MY cursive is considerably less legible than printing (dunno 'bout speed). And there are many like me…
So, yeah, it’s possible that autz’s son could be denied the opportunity of developing a beautiful flowing script hand that causes women to swoon, if he doesn’t learn cursive. OR - he may be being saved from four years of trying to tame a demented spider.
There is no “limit” on what you can teach your kids. If they don’t know how to knit or replace an alternator or throw a slider or apply mascara it isn’t going to be because they learned cursive.
Sure, written media may be completely foreign in schools one day, with every kid having a laptop- but that day probably won’t be in the next ten years, so until then it might be handy for him to write well.
Besides, rightly or wrongly, fluid, legible handwriting is often taken as a sign of intelligence, just like speaking clearly. I’ve often heard “how smart I must be” - from teachers more than anyone else- because of my handwriting.
Of course there is a limit: after you get home, have dinner, clean up the kitchen, make sure school work is done, it’s what? Seven o’clock? Even if you had “extra school” every night from seven until bedtime (and do you really want to do that?), you’ve got ten hours during the week and another ten, tops, on the weekend. And that’s if “extra school” takes over everything else. More realistically, you’ve got a couple hours a couple times a week to teach a kid something they have no interest in learning (and you use those other 16 hours to help your child learn things through activities that they are interested in). Any more than that, they start to resent the whole process and you for insisting on it. So there is a limit.
If I slow my cursive down enough for it to be legible to someone else, or even myself at a later date, it is slower than printing. And additional practice may make it a little faster, but for me seems to make it less and less legible.
Ascenray, if you’re still following this thread, did you actually have elementary school teachers who taught that openminded perspective on letterforms?
I certainly did, and I went to English private schools full of mean old ladies.
Of course, when we first learned to write in cursive (or joined-up, as it’s called in England), everything was to be perfect. At my first cursive-teaching school, I was taught the Marion Richardson style- non-looped cursive, basically, wherein every letter that had a straight bit- “h”, for example, retained its straight bit. We would be marked down for looping anything that wasn’t supposed to be looped.
After that, I went to a school where the teachers didn’t care what style of cursive you used, just as long as you weren’t printing. By that point, individual students were creating and refining their own letterforms, just as ascenray suggests.
I taught myself to loop my characters, after deciding that the Marion Richardson nonsense I was taught looked “childish”.
They didn’t need to. The first time handwriting was taught, it was through copying a particular copperplate-style hand. But once that year was over, no teacher ever insisted that students stick to that particular hand.
