Why do they bother to teach us cursive in school?
I’m a proficient writer, yet I find writing in a mixture of cursive and print to be fastest. On some combinations, cursive wins for speed (d to e, f to u, u to l, are good examples) but for legibility, print wins nearly every time. Fact is, they spent a lot of time teaching us a lot of useless stuff at school. I’m appalled that people generally leave school having spent a couple years learning French or chemistry, yet have no idea about economics, law, how to handle their personal finances, how to run a business, or how to behave in society.
Nobody ever said that people who write in cursive would be first against the wall when the revolution comes. Hmmm, what an interesting idea. A few years ago a friend stated that he had lost the ability to write in cursive through disuse. I laughed. Then I realized how little I still use it. When writing for someone else to read I always use print just to make it easier for them. I still use cursive to write notes for myself, but that is a pretty limited use. I am not in school anymore and I take limited notes in meetings, someone usually prepares minutes for important meetings anyway. I think cursive is still a good skill to have. Shorthand would be really nice to know. However, most schools in our area no longer stress it, which seems about right to me. Teach it, but don’t make a big deal out of it. Most assignments are prepared on the computer and printing is allowed except for those assignments geared to teaching cursive writing. By the way, didn’t we have a question on this subject
My (American) wife writes in that odd American cursive, and I always joke that it looks like ‘granny-writing’, the crabbed hand that I associate with birthday cards from my elderly relatives. Like dash_slot, I learned the basics of ‘joined-up’ writing and went from there. It’s usually quite decent at ensuring legibility without turning things into a Victorian calligraphy class. I very rarely need to shift to printing letters, and there’s more ‘flow’ between brain and pen than when typing. Why is it still done in American schools? As others have said, it’s vestigial, and coming up with an alternative in an environment dominated by the keyboard is probably now considered a waste of time. A interesting point of comparison, perhaps, might be French and German schools, where fountain pens are still used from an early age, and you’ll find a decent array of ‘school pens’ for the purpose. There’s a different cultural sense, especially in France, of the relationship of penmanship to creative ex
