Why do they bother to teach us cursive in school?
If so, it’s a fairly large one. I’m hardly the only literate, numerate person with good penmanship. No, you’re not. But, according to the data, it is against the odds that you would get those skills from the American public education system. You really think if only we got rid of penmanship class everything would be magical? No, but I think that part of good education is emphasizing more useful material over less useful material. As Miko has noted, some people still write faster than they type and prefer to take notes that way. I have to write for work when marking up proofs. Just because some people have constructed their lives around not writing doesn’t mean that is inherently the most efficient way to approach communication (and notice what all those people who don’t write are bad at). I’m not saying that cursive shouldn’t be taught – I’m just saying that it doesn’t need to be taught in schools. People could still learn it on their own time, or their parents could enroll them in pen
but for legibility, print wins nearly every time Well, that’s part of the reason they teach you cursive: if you have good penmanship, your cursive is legible to people who have also learned cursive, and it is much faster to write. And wackybrit, school is all about how to behave in society: shut up, sit down, and do what you’re told. As for the subject matter, generally schools don’t teach you vocational things because the world teaches you vocational things. School is the place for learning things that are worthwhile but whose uses are not obvious. My life was certainly enriched by learning French and chemistry, and the the skills I used to learn such are applicable in learning anything else after–like how to run a business.
I am pretty freaking literate and numerate and I am very proud of my penmanship (printing, formal cursive, and informal cursive) That’s your business, but that seems an exceedingly odd thing to be proud of — as if you, as an adult, were proud of your dodgeball or hopscotch skills, or of your ability to assemble dioramas inside shoe boxes. they teach cursive because it is useful and beautiful Useful, maybe marginally so. I think it would be more useful to just teach kids skills at faster and more accurate printing. Beautiful is of course in the eye of the beholder, so I’ll say that to me most cursive writing is a horrible spiky mess that drifts into illegibility-through-idiosyncracy far faster than printing does. One could argue that cursive develops fine motor control, but if you want to achieve that goal there are surely better sets of exercises. ISTR an earlier thread on this here or MoFi wherein it was revealed that cursive has dropped off the agenda in at least some modern element
