Series?
Kids can’t google and read the Constitution on the interweb? Of the Federelist papers?
Cursive is a dead language. I might be in the minority here, but spending the amount of time it takes to learn cursive in a limited curriculum in a keyboard drive world is silly.
The dumbing down of America starts with wasting phenomenal amounts of time learning things of limited value.
Cursive is dead. I helped to kill it by rebelling against it since middle school.
Good riddance.
At first, I thought you were some kind of Jesuit lefty teacher ... until I read your home page ....
I love really good cursive writing, I am 71 so I am among those who ATTEMPTED to learn cursive in school. Unfortunately I never seemed to be any good at it no matter how hard I tried, some of my classmates who were good at it didn’t seem to be really good at much else, it seemed to require a certain artistic ability and I am a technician. I have seen very few who could write in a classy looking, easy to read cursive. I always wanted to but finally just gave up and started block printing so that people could read what I wrote. I would pay a fairly large sum if someone could teach me to write in the style of John Hancock or some of the other founding fathers.
Cursive may not be your cup of tea, but it is important and should not be relegated to the status of a lost art. Kids who won’t read/write cursive will be at a disadvantage. I expect good parents who homeschool will continue to teach the basics, and their children will be more successful than others.
You mentioned “a keyboard drive world”. That isn’t even the case any more. The existence of keyboards are dwindling due to new voice recognition software and poking letters on a flat screen. There may be a time when kids won’t be able to Google anything or read the “interweb”. We don’t know what restrictions future leaders have in store for us.
Latin also is “dead”. But I learned it, and it has made school and life easier. The smartest people I know were Latin students. So it’s dead, but is helpful.
But if those kids are unable to read the original, how will they know if the version they’re reading online is correct? Once no one can read the original, it becomes very easy to start introducing paraphrases and distortions by “making the language accessible”.
A signature which means something is cursive, So now we print and when you kill that all you have to remember is the X.
Not sure I agree at all. Frankly, I don’t thing the schools need to bring the computer into the schools until high school.
Just MHO.
You cannot read most original documents if you do not read cursive. How would you know the document had been translated properly? How would you know if the wording or even punctuation had been changed to reflect a different meaning?
In doing real research it is necessary to access original documents, that won’t matter if people can’t read them. If enough people cannot read cursive the powers that be can pass off any meaning they like as being in a particular document.
When I worked on my family history I had to read many documents written in cursive. I am sure glad I learned to read and write.
“Cursive is a dead language.”
Technically, any linked language is cursive; some types of “linked printing” are cursive. My grandparents were taught Spencerian cursive; I was taught looped cursive (which I hated with a passion and quit using ASAP); I taught my kids Italic cursive.
But I do essentially agree that cursive is rapidly becoming a dead language that doesn’t need to be taught, because most people do so little handwriting that print is perfectly functional. OTOH, Latin is a dead language, and I still teach my kids a lot of it. I also expect them to be able to read cursive, not least because a lot of older kid’s books would have inserted letters or the like that are in a cursive script.
It’s also nice to be able to directly check primary history sources, or even your own personal history (letters to and from grandparents; notes in old family books), which are mostly in some form of cursive.
How about we teach them grammar. In the time that remains, they can learn cursive.
Do you print your name when you endorse your pay check?
Thought so...
Regards,
GtG