The End of Cursive
November 19, 2011
THE latest fad in public education is eliminating cursive penmanship, a move that Linda Schrock Taylor at LewRockwell.com says represents “literacy’s last hurrah.” Cursive helps children learn to read. She writes:
As a child does cursive writing, the rhythmic and purposeful movements of the hand and pencil echo and reinforce the child’s thoughts and speech, matching and practicing those two basic and automatically acquired skills. Children master language without effort. With cursive writing, learners can see and feel the reading process pouring forth from their hands in reverse. Why would such a tool not help to make up for missing and/or ineffective classroom instruction and curriculum?
Educators seem bent on destroying learning:
Teachers are now ordered to push the use of computers, spell checkers, calculators, writing groups, peer editing, peer tutoring, student-discovery of algorithms, and worse. Now, the Educated Idiot Decision Makers summarily dismiss cursive instruction.
With the end of cursive classes, the die will be cast and the loss of potential immeasurable. Our future citizens will not even be able to have a signature!
She does not mention a major incentive for “educators” to abandon cursive: it’s time-consuming to teach and is a skill that cannot be quantified on standardized tests. It serves no purpose to the system. Everything that does not keep this mass bureaucracy afloat or make it run more smoothly is ultimately useless. Public education is a machine. Cursive gums up the works.
Taylor recommends a fight against this latest innovation. The effort would be better spent on getting as many children as possible out of the system. Our last chance has long since passed.
— Comments —
Sage McLaughlin writes:
Recently, I noticed that I and just about everyone else I knew had reverted to printing everything, on the odd occasion we were constrained to write anything by hand, and this bothered me, for the reasons you cite. I cannot imagine the great men of letters from any earlier era–the men I admire most–abandoning penmanship as a prized skill, for naught but laziness. The disappearance of handwriting is a symptom of the general degradation of our language, and of the disappearance of literacy in general.
Therefore, I made a decision to write in cursive, and to do so at every opportunity. I am embarrassed to relate to you how difficult this was. I had actually forgotten how correctly to write a capital letter “I,” and my first attempts were rough and weak-handed. After a little practice, of course, it came back naturally enough, and now I find that it is a real source of relish. I write checks whenever I can, trying to take pride in my penmanship, and I have changed my signature from the usual contemporary scrawl something more formal and stylized.
It’s a small thing, I realize, but small things are big things these days. Modern Western Man is a child, and must often take pride in the accomplishments of a child. These are the little steps we have to take on the road back to maturity.
Laura writes:
It’s hard to recover lost proficiency in cursive. Everybody writes less these days so it’s easy to get rusty.
Diana writes:
I was raised to refer to cursive writing as “joined script” or just “writing in script.” I knew the word cursive, it was always jiggling around in that part of one’s brain that says, “look me up when you
have time” – and never did. So thanks for pushing me to look it up.
More important, for some years I have been dismayed that my own cursive handwriting has degenerated due to lack of use. A few months ago I decided to hand-write things more often rather than
tapping them out on the computer but I wasn’t very good at keeping up.
Your post about the loss of this crucial skill has motivated me to renew my efforts. From now on, everything (except e-mails!) gets the handwritten treatment. I’m even going to practice my penmanship when I have nothing particular to write. Who knows, maybe something good will come out.
I wonder whether discarding cursive will lead to an even more deadening of the individual spirit. We were all drilled intensively to write exactly alike, yet none of us does write exactly alike. I
believe that cursive, with its graceful joins, forms and curlicues, offers the individual both more structure and greater opportunities to express individuality. Printing is more uniform and thus masks the expression of the individual. Typing offers no opportunity for the individual to express himself in the formation of the letters. Does the medium affect the message? One wonders.
Laura writes:
Cursive, because of its beauty and expressiveness, remains a superior medium in which to write a personal letter.
The art of penmanship also has spiritual rewards because the painstaking work of the hand is meditative.
Diana adds:
Let’s remember what Aristotle said about habits: “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”
This is so true. Habit has helped me lose 23 pounds in the last 6 months. Habit will help me to hand write in cursive again (with a few printed formations).
BRING BACK HAND WRITING. BRING BACK CURSIVE.
NEVER GIVE UP. NEVER NEVER GIVE UP. (Churchill)
And eat vegetables. With butter.
