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Cursive Writing Is a Fading Skill — Does It Matter?
antdude sends along an AP piece on the decline of the teaching of cursive writing in schools — ramifications of which we've discussed a few times before. "The decline of cursive is happening as students are doing more and more work on computers, including writing. In 2011, the writing test of the National Assessment of Educational Progress will require 8th and 11th graders to compose on computers, with 4th graders following in 2019. ... Handwriting is increasingly something people do only when they need to make a note to themselves rather than communicate with others, [an educator] said. Students accustomed to using computers to write at home have a hard time seeing the relevance of hours of practicing cursive handwriting. 'I am not sure students have a sense of any reason why they should vest their time and effort in writing a message out manually when it can be sent electronically in seconds.'"
"But cursive is favored by fewer college-bound students. In 2005, the SAT began including a written essay portion, and a 2007 report by the College Board found that about 15 percent of test-takers chose to write in cursive, while the others wrote in print. "
I don't really understand. There seem to be two kind of handwriting competing for the written part, but I have never seen that in classes. Writing in print is writing each letter like the printer does, without linking them ? How can you write an essay like that ? It must take ages ? In France we learn it and then quickly forget it to only write cursive.
Smoke signalling is a dead art. No one remembers the old smoke signals used by native american tribes - not even native americans! Should we worry?
It's called progress. Those grade school teachers who insist on continuing to preach arcane methods would probably find a more efficient use of their time if they taught their students to type right after teaching them basic writing skills. I don't know many people who can spout out cursive at over 80 words per minute.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Actually churning butter and forging horseshoes would have been pretty cool to learn and far more useful then learning cursive. Eg, Churning butter would have engaged the students and also taught them a bit about where their food comes from, as whilst we use machines now, butter is still created from the same basic processes. Learning about metallurgy can be useful later in life if you choose to go down that path, boiler makers, fitters + turners are actually fairly highly sort and pretty well paid in the scheme of things. But cursive, well unless informed otherwise, I haven't come across a use for it yet.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of cats. MEOW!!
I actually had an 8th grade metal shop class where we had a forge and were taught how to make hammers, horseshoes and various blades. It was a blast. A very popular class back in...mmmmm...about the early 1980s.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
I doubt that cursive writing will go away anymore than concept sketching will go away. The neuro-motor connection is valuable in enhancing learning and understanding. People will still write in notebooks and journals that don't need electricity. The people who can't write in the future will be the same people who can't write now; the neglected, the mentally impaired, the lazy, and those who depended on the public school system to give them the essential skills.
Especially important is the need for learning and understanding. According to John Medina in his book, "Brain Rules", concepts are learned better and more thoroughly if there is a little more effort put into the learning process. Motor memory is apparently a good adjunct to learning, especially in complex relationships.
The ability to communicate, on the other hand, is being lost at a tremendous rate. People who can't spell are trying to write about complex problems. People with bad grammar are trying to discuss important political, social and scientific issues. People who can't do basic arithmetic are trying to make sense out of figures that are twisted, distorted and under-represented in the daily media. People who can't think are still trying to vote intelligently and failing. (And,look at what happens daily on /. !)
I can use a number of computer drafting and drawing tools pretty well, but if I want to really understand something, I draw it by hand. (There is also something satisfying about the order that comes from drawing my pencil across my straight-edge, but that's something different.) I spent many hours learning to create legible printed text to COMMUNICATE ideas to others, but my own thinking is usually accompanied by either quick notes that look like shorthand, or complete notes in cursive so I can understand them later. Sometimes my slide rule is more valuable to understanding something than a calculator. Short notes and memos are still more easily written than typed, printed and delivered.
A few months ago a lawyer friend of mine mentioned that her son couldn't read an analog watch. He wears one, but it doesn't tell him the time. There is a whole level of understanding about the world that came from learning to tell time. I seemed to have a connection with the turning of the earth. I could find true North if I was lost in the woods. I could calculate height and distance without a tape measure. I could go sailing and be pretty sure I would end up where I wanted. The ability to read, write and calculate helped mankind overcome basic limitations by enhancing basic metal abilities. I am afraid the serfs of the future will be those that have been removed from the basic skills by layers of technology they use without the underlying knowledge to support it. (In my field, I have already been all but replaced by people who are called programmers, but can't do Boolean Algebra or Assembly language. A bunch of "cookbook" programmers who seem to think that writing code is more important than solving a problem. They rely, as they should, on solutions painstakingly solved by the programmers of my generation which have been combined into large complex systems and placed in books and repositories. But they couldn't reproduce the solutions if they had to start from scratch.)
As you may have guessed, I'm worried that the loss of the ability to write will diminish our ability to think and communicate. Cursive writing is only part of this process, so the loss of manual writing ability does not depend on a specific style. Cursive penmanship did give us a common ground for understanding the ideas of other people. Linguists tell us that the actual understanding of written communication is tremendously difficult, even if the communication is simple and clearly presented.
"The mind works quicker than you think!"
That is a funny and in a way, prescient thought. I for one believe that not only is cursive on the outs, but our current form of expression of text as well; though on a somewhat longer time scale. We may be headed full circle back towards some form of iconographic means of communication, indeed like a system of hieroglyphics.
Hasn't the internet seen a proliferation of images and video and a transition from long texts to bloggable and twitterable "bits" of text? Are we headed in the "Western World" toward a different symbology? Consider Chinese Script or Japanese or some of the other Asian scripts which are, after a fashion, more wholly iconographic.
"A 'picture' is worth a thousand words"
Is it feasible that we are heading toward a new style of the consolidation of information? When was the last time you read a 1000 page book? Are Universities graduating more Literature majors or more Graphic Designers? Just a thought...
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Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only at night.
-Edgar Allen Poe
When I was a teenager, lo so many years ago, I had a female friend who had really nice handwriting. On those rare occasions that my friends and I skipped school, she was always the one who'd write our "excuse" notes because her writing made for a believable note from mom. So tell me - if cursive writing is lost, who is going to write the mom notes for those poor children of the future?
#DeleteChrome
I'm left-handed. In school, I found that my writing tended to become illegible rather quickly, because of having to `push' rather than `pull' across the paper.
One day, I was browsing in a bookshop when I noticed a facsimile of some of Leonardo da Vinci's notes. Now, everyone knows that he wrote his personal notes backwards, and writing backwards is often a sign of left-handedness. And since da Vinci hacked on just about everything else going in Renaissance Italy, I wondered whether he might have hacked his own handwriting for ease of use. And he must have had to write to other people occasionally --- he couldn't ALWAYS have written backwards.
So I bought the book and with a mirror and a magnifying-glass figured out how he formed his letters. And I found that actually, his handwriting is very easy when writing left-to-right. I think that most of the ease comes from replacing difficult `pushed' curves with straight lines wherever possible. For example, using a small capital N rather than n, using a small captial A rather than a, forming g like a modern cursive z, and so on. Other improvements appear to have been made for speed, such as not dotting i or j. Other decisions appear to have been made to slow the hand down briefly but regularly; for example, writing capitals large, and with curves.
So I adopted his ways of forming letters, and found that I could write quicker, more fluidly, and without much of the hand-cramp from which I used to suffer. A decade later, I still use his handwriting.