That’s what I’m beginning to think.
I just don’t understand it: “Yay, my handwriting is so special and different, no one can read it, not even myself after some period of time has gone by!” I know a 4-year old that writes the most fantastic stories, with a big red crayon and squiggly lines that looks like joined-up writing, but it’s really just gibberish because she forgets the story a few minutes later and it can never be re-told because it isn’t recoverable from her “writing”. I get it from a 4 year old. I don’t get it from a 40 year old. What is the point? Why are people happy to lose information - to stop communicating - like this?
Maybe it’s just the way I was taught - I spent at most one year (grade 3) where “proper” letter forms were expected (though my teacher allowed a few variants for different letters) and while we had some repetitive work, we also simply just wrote stories/journals to practice our writing. I suppose it was hard…until I learned how to do it and then it was just another way to write. But it’s exactly the same way that I learned how to print in grade 1! It’s how kids learn. I guess I just wasn’t frustrated by it, and don’t consider it evil. It also allowed me to finally begin to decipher my grandmother’s letters to us, and to read the journal my late MIL wrote when my husband was born.
Dunno. I just like it and I don’t want it to go away.
A CNN.com essay on the topic. The writer seems to think there’s cursive, and there’s crap. Why can’t kids just be taught to print neatly? Just about everyone’s handwriting deteriorates over time, anyway: Nation of adults who will write like children? - CNN.com
I think it’s been shown that transitioning from printing to cursive results in pedagogical setbacks for students. Forcing students to write in a new form retards their ability to learn other material because they are thinking more about how to form their letters and therefore less about the material they are writing. To me, that’s more than enough justification for ending the archaic practice of teaching one writing method to young children and then forcing a completely different method on them when they are older.
But I see no reason not to just start then off on cursive!
People will object that it would be too difficult, but I’m not aware of any studies that support it, and I doubt it. Hand printed letterforms differ from typeset ones already (especially “a” and “g”) without it impeding students’ ability to read and write, and simplified cursive forms that more closely resemble typeset forms can be used.
I think cursive is faster than printing for people who are equally skilled in both, and that’s a good reason for using it. It is somewhat counterintuitive, but I know that when I print very quickly I tend to join many of the strokes together naturally, and I think most people do. I write almost everything in cursive, although it doesn’t perfectly match the form I was taught. I can definitely write more quickly in cursive, even when I take care to write legibly, than I can print. Nice cursive is also prettier than nice printing.
So just teach cursive.
I taught in a school where the children learn cursive right from Kindergarten. Their writing was awful at the beginning but was beautiful after a year or so. Their spelling was much better as they learnt words as a joined unit, they could ‘feel’ how the words were spelt as they wrote them. By the time these children were in third grade their writing content was much better than other schools in the region as they weren’t focused on mechanics, they were thinking about expressing themselves. The other school were introducing cursive in third grade and those students had to think more about the mechanics.
As for why bother with writing at all. Well, children learn key-boarding skills usually beginning in second grade. Before that their fingers are too small to learn touch typing. We can’t leave them not writing until then, can we?
This is an old (2009) article about how cursive writing affects brain development, which is also an interesting read. this