A TV news story last night revealed that several states are stopping the teaching of cursive in schools. One school administrator justified it with with the lame excuse that kids just text and type on computers now, so it is not necessary. The news anchor remarked that soon nobody will be able to read John Hancock’s signature.
Now, I sort of think this is not good, but I cannot really say why, except that I wonder what will happen to signatures. Will they soon stop teaching mathematics because of the ubiquitous calculator?
Back in my day we studied “penmanship” right up until junior high. Unfortunately, I had (and still have) terrible penmanship. We were taught the Palmer Method, but it never did me any good.
What really infuriated me, however, was that homework or tests would be marked down if the handwriting was not sufficiently good. I’d get an A+ on a paper, but the teacher would write a note that it was reduced to a B due to the bad penmanship. I still, to this day, feel that was grossly unfair.
Wat do y’all think about this development in our education system?
I have no issue with it; I’d guess that for about 90% of folks, their signature is the only thing that they ever write in cursive. Seems a lot of time to spend teaching a generic skill so that you can make a single, unchanging mark.
They used to teach home economics in school too and this also been dropped from the curriculum in many jurisdictions.
It is debatable whether or not this is a negative, a positive or a mere “meh” but I am inclined to beleive that we were better off when kids got schooling on how to prepare their own meals from raw foods.
Get rid of it. Most people can’t do it well enough to earn style points for it even after years of practice. Those that really want to learn it still will just like some people still know how to do calligraphy. It would be nice if there was enough time to teach everyone to do everything well but it should be on the short list of things replaced in school by things that are much more relevant now. Learning cursive wasn’t much fun for me and many others. I only use my own style of mixed writing now that is mostly print anyway.
That was my experience, too. My sister had taught me to read before school started, and I modeled my printing on the type in my story books. Thirty-six years later, and I have still not changed this habit.
I had marks off for printing “wrong,” and by the time cursive script came up, I had already had more than three years to get used to writing (printing) the way I did - not much to gain in the way of speed, and the legibility was poor. It seemed a pointless exercise in 1977. I had my first personal computer three years later, and there seemed very little reason to bother with cursive after that.
Thirty years on, cursive writing seems a practical and relevant a skill as Pitman shorthand, and as often as not it’s nearly as hard to decipher. Why bother?
Fretting about people not being able to read John Hancock’s signature (or any other cursive) is absurd. We move forward, and obsolete systems belong in the past. The orthography of the relatively recent past seems hopelessly obscure at first glance, and yet anyone with an interest can make sense of it in short order. It will be the same with cursive, and no-one will lose anything by skipping this in order to learn skills that still have some application in life.
I agree with the consensus in this thread, particularly with Larry Mudd’s comments about the (non) importance of being able to read old documents written in cursive.
Cursive is an obsolete skill and there’s no real advantage in teaching it to kids anymore. As for signatures, MrWhatsit already prints his signature. It’s quite distinctive from my printing, or our kids’ printing, or anyone else’s printing that I’ve seen.
And anyway, written signatures are heading for obsolescence too.
It may well have a negative effect on signatures but for most people signatures are becoming used less and less as well. For those in careers where signatures are actually important they can work on them however they’d like knowing the complete cursive alphabet isn’t even important for that.
I was in grade school towards the end of cursive’s importance. Being able to write cursive certainly improved ones ability to write a long paper more quickly. As computers came around however writing a paper by hand becomes a thing of the past. By High school hand written papers weren’t acceptable.
So we could keep making kids learn a skill that has little value of we could instead take that time to teach them skills that will have value in the future. Personally I’d much rather kids be taught how to type and use computers than write cursive.
If time wasn’t a factor I’d want them to be taught every skill imaginable. But time is a factor so I’ll survive knowing kids aren’t going to be learning cursive or underwater basket weaving.
Myself it is a daunting task to actually write in cursive now and I’ve become much faster at print. Very few customers are interested in an itemized bill written out in cursive. For the few former school teachers over 60 I’ll make the effort and they appreciate the nostalgic value. In time they’ll have died off and my cursive will have no value in my life. The younger customers don’t even seem to care for itemized bills they’d be happy with a business card with the total on it.
I say let it go. I learned shorthand and typing in high school. I can read Gregg Shorthand, but who uses it today? I can write it but I’m not fast enough with it to be able to make it practical.
Now people put notes on tape and have their admins transcribe it.
I think teaching it is useful for kids, but forcing it to be used much past the 5th grade or so is a waste. It should be given as an option to kids and if they don’t want it, they can quit using it.
There no way I could have taken notes during lectures fast enough in high school if I had to print. I know it’s not an issue in college now as I assume the kids just bring laptops to class, but I don’t know of any high schools around me that allow that.
It won’t even have a negative effect on signatures. It will just mean that people might write their signatures differently. (How many people use school-style cursive for signatures anyways? Most of the ones I see are barely-decipherable scribbles.)
Also, my signature is in (a form of) cursive, even though I didn’t start using a signature for anything until years after I stopped using cursive altogether (which was, I believe, a year and a half after they started wasting hours and hours teaching it in school).
I used printed notes in class through high school and college, and they served well enough - for me. (I doubt anyone else would have been able to read them; when I write quick notes my “a”'s are interpreted by most people as a “z” or a "2, and my "g"s start to look like “O- o”) But it’s still quicker and more legible than I ever managed to be with cursive.
I had to use cursive at least some of the time for years in school (including in-class essays), and I still found it SLOWER than printing, even when trying to print such that the teacher could read my writing. When I’m writing for just myself, as in taking notes, I use my own system of modified letter shapes and intermittently connected letters - it’s sort of a print-cursive-jumble hybrid mushmash. Of course, now that I use a tablet PC, I have had to spend a fair amount of time teaching the handwriting recognition program to read accelerated mishmash.
I guess that, despite my utter abandonment of cursive now, I can see the value in at least exposing kids to cursive. Everyone’s writing methods and preferred hand movements are different, and maybe some kids who are struggling to write legibly and efficiently can use cursive to develop their own style that works for them while being clear enough to the intended readers.
Maybe you or someone else can explain this to me: how is cursive faster than print?
Speed was the only legitimate reason I’d ever heard for using cursive, but it was simply never true for me, and apparently for others on this thread as well.
It sure seems to me that my writing speed is limited by the length of inked lines on the page. I can only move my pen or pencil so fast before it skips or tears the paper.
For uninked lines I can go much more quickly; and even better, when my pen is lifted I can go straight to the next character without having to loop the line around in some roundabout fashion.
To a first approximation, my print characters are all subsets of their cursive counterparts; just with fewer lines. For me, adding inked lines is always slower. The time to lift/drop the pen is essentially zero since it’s a part of a movement I’m making anyway.
My dad was one of those who liked to punish (teach as he called it) by making me write “sentences” of what I did wrong, or what I shouldn’t do rather, over and over.
It seemed to be a fad with him, only lasted a few years. But I filled many a 5-subject notebook. Little did he know that when he wasn’t looking, I would do it wrong. I’d go down the page, writing the first letter of each sentence, then the second, and so on. Kinda lost the effect of the meaningless repetition of a pointless phrase about not talking back or something.
But anyway, I got really fast at writing normal print when I wouldn’t “cheat” like that. And my letters sort of started to connect together a little bit. Then I realized that I was writing my own form of cursive. It’s different than “normal” cursive, and just about as legible, but it’s totally unique. I’m kinda proud of it.
My normal penmanship however is laughable. Makes me look uneducated and I can’t change it no matter how hard I try.
