Drawing comes up regularly in daily life? I don’t know about you, but certainly not mine. No where near the extent that taking notes did, as an undergraduate, anyway.
I imagine plenty of people get by fine taking notes in non-cursive writing, though. So the question becomes, is the advantage cursive gives you over that comparable to the advantage one could get with improvement in drawing skills (or whatever else)?
I’m sure the answer will differ from person to person, but I don’t think it’ll be any kind of blowout in favor of cursive education (at least, not in the “Look at this fixed script. Now stick to these letterforms!” style I, and probably most other Americans of recent generations, was given)
(I also imagine electronic note-taking will become de rigeur not too far from now. Already, you see so much of it.)
Yes, but what happens to electronic note-taking when civilization crashes and burns and we have to start over again without electronic crutches?
I vote for a return to hieroglyphics.
Its redevelopment will be our first priority.
We won’t have writing to worry about for a very long time, as the crutch of the written word will be gone for generations.
It’s as useful (or not) as calligraphy. In other words, no.
Read A Canticle For Leibowitz for the answer to this one. 
I don’t see a decline in critical thinking skills. Assuming you’ve been at this for a while, how much do you see your kids after they go off to college? So much of what we are doing in high school is prepping our kids for the truly amazing cognitive leaps they will make in their early 20s: if we did our job right, the results don’t all materialize for years. Some of my kids have crashed and burned, or failed to launch, but many are happy, healthy, and successful in professions that require a great deal of critical thinking.
I don’t think there is anything wrong with teaching a kid cursive, and if it’s something they want to learn, I’d encourage it, but I just can’t see it as essential in this day and age, not with the extraordinarily limited time many parents have with their kids. I’ve had too many students who never used cursive (and almost none of them do anymore) go on to be successful.
I do think everyone should be able to read cursive, but I don’t know if you even have to teach that: the brain can figure it out, and if you ever need to read a lot of it, you’ll pick up speed through application.
Those are two dramatically different things, used in dramatically different circumstances.
Cursive is about writing fast when you don’t have access to a computer or aren’t an ace touch-typist. Legibility is important, but second to speed. Looking good is way down the list.
Calligraphy is about beauty. Legibility is not as important, and speed doesn’t matter at all.
Printing is about legibility. Speed is a distant second and beauty isn’t on the list at all for the most point.
Typing beats both Cursive and Printing, for speed and legibility. I rather the kids be taught to print then type.
If they need speed they can pick up a tape recorder or learn shorthand.
I am a beaurocrat and I hardly ever need to take written notes longer than a paragraph. I use the computer for nigh everything.
All of those are Knowledges not skills. They teach one to think. Cursive does not add anything rather than “pretty writing”.
Obtaining knowledge doesn’t teach you to think. Being taught to think teaches you how to think.
Cursive writing is essential for courting ladies.
Yeah…
D’Nelian is just the name of the publisher who prints the torture devices, ack, I mean workbooks for kids to copy out of.
Italic is named after the original cursive, invented by Italian monks on the 1500s. I don’t recall when and where loopy cursive was invented, but whoever did so should be dug up, brought back to life, and then executed.
Italic cursive is basically joined printing. Not every letter connects. Capital letters are block printed letters. (Loopy cursive capital G? F? J? Q??? S? Z?? Any resemblance to actual letters, living or dead, is purely coincidental.)
Loopy cursive is ugly. Italic is artistic and beautiful. Those loops and letters that don’t look like their printed counterparts take extra time, so Italic is faster. It also encourages individuality, which most of my students love. It also has some cool quirks, like starting a letter after “t” from the crossbar.
I teach my fifth graders italic in two hours over two days. And then it’s done. No boring worksheets all year…we simply practice with the writing we’d be doing anyway.
And I use it myself!
It seems to me, it’s “printing” that should be left out. Teaching writing should go straight to italics.
I don’t (and never have taught) young kids how to hand write, so I’m just guessing here…but I think even italic is difficult fine-motor-wise. The coursebooks start with printing, though, and the printing is almost identical to the final cursive. (Cursive, btw, simply means joined writing…it doesn’t imply flowery, loopy handwriting.) Loopy cursive, though, is more difficult because so many of the letters do not not resemble their printed counterparts, and some of the joins are pretty convoluted and contrived for the sake of the join.
It’s a very simple final step into joining the letters, but I wouldn’t teach that to a kinder or first grader unless she was ready for it.
I certainly hope you’re right. I haven’t been at this for very long. I was motivated to start teaching because as a hiring manager in the world of commerce over the past 30 years I was getting frightened by the poor writing and thinking skills of young employees, even those with MBAs and advanced engineering degrees.
I certainly don’t put it down to the de-emphasis of cursive handwriting, and in response to an earlier post I’m afraid I don’t have any data to present to back up my observation about critical thinking skills (but it is crisp enough to me to have changed careers as a consequence). Thirty-five years ago we did indeed teach rhetoric in high school along with a variety of manual arts that built very neatly upon the “fine motor skills” introduced with cursive handwriting. Very sadly, perhaps disastrously, those paths are not longer offered so unless you’re successful in the remaining college-bound academic track you’re shit outta luck.
This trend in narrowing curricula is due to economics. But I’m suspicious that the change (I’m claiming) in critical thinking skills is due more to some shift in parenting that has been initiated by my generation (possibly due to pot smoking, I don’t know). For some reason we’ve been supervising our kids, organizing them, arranging their play dates, telling them where to go and what to do so much that they are losing the instincts to make their own decisions. My son is off to college this year and I am astonished at the programs aimed at me, his parent, that the college is offering so that I can help him get going. There was nothing like that when I went off to college.
If this is true (and I’m not agreeing with you here, necessarily) it’s due to one thing: fear. Your generation got afraid of kidnappers and child molestors and drug dealers and that creepy kid down the block and and and … !
Not one of those things are worth being afraid of. ‘Stranger Danger’ is a joke: Most molestation happens within the family, or at least from people the kids already know and the parents trust. Drug dealers are trying to gain clients, not frighten them away or (god forbid) scare them enough to go to the police. (Remember the ‘pushy pushers’ from TV in the 1980s? Has there ever been a dealer so stupid?) The creepy kid down the street is likely more into video games than anything else, and we all know complete social isolation is the best cure for being an awkward adolescent. (Remember Columbine? Klebold could have been saved, but Harris was a time bomb. Parenting isn’t a cure-all.)
True, but it is of little use when runnin’ these hos, which I gather is the preferred activity of the young man-about-town these days.