Don’t Dis Cursive
I moved a lot (a lot) when I was a school kid. There were advantages and disadvantages to that. But mostly it was just weird. One of the weird things was that I was never taught to write cursive. One school taught it second semester, and I was gone by the time they got to it. The next school had already taught it in first semester by the time I arrived. No problem, though. I just developed a kind of personal cursive that involved randomly stringing printed letters together and ensuring that no one would ever be able to read anything I wrote by hand.
Fortunately, the need for cursive died a quick death not long after, and I became the proud owner of a typewriter. Today, few if any schools teach cursive. As we all peck away on our keyboards and phones, not knowing cursive doesn’t seem like much of a loss. Still, cursive is trying to make a comeback. And the arguments for why we should be teaching it are interesting.
The first has to do with history. You don’t have to go that far back to find a time when historical documents were handwritten — the US Constitution, just to name one small example. Less august, and less ancient, historical material is often written in cursive: diaries, birth and death records, meeting notes. If you can’t write cursive, you probably can’t read cursive. So if we stop teaching cursive, who’s going to read old documents?
There are also scientific reasons for bringing back those looping letters that used to grace the tops of blackboards (which are also becoming extinct, I think). According to research done in the past few years, mastering handwriting helps develop connections between different parts of the brain, which is good for cognitive development and can help children learn to read. Cursive can also help students develop patience and enhance their creativity.
So perhaps I missed out on more than I realized by not learning cursive. What do you think? Should we start teaching cursive again?
’til next time,
Avery