Pennsylvania schools will be required to teach cursive again starting in April

FOX29 Philadelphia ^ | 03.09.26 | Isabel Soisson

[big truck]

PENNSYLVANIA - Starting next month, all public and private schools in Pennsylvania will be required to reintroduce cursive handwriting into their curriculum.

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TOPICS: Chit/Chat; Education; Miscellaneous
KEYWORDS:

[ggboss]

“My gosh .... when and why did they ever take it away???

Because you don’t have to write with a feather or a fountain pen

[big truck]

No.

But at 5 feet all and 90 lbs, Mrs. Big Truck is stern enough. Trust me - she has the respect of all of her students. And their parents.

[Carl Vehse]

The school board and administrators who initially stop the teaching of cursive writing in schools should be summarily fired and any teaching credentials revoked. They should also should be issued restraining orders making it a crime for them to get any closer that 200 yards from a public school.

[FrankRizzo890]

I used to work for a company that made technology for the classroom, and some of our units were misbehaving in this school in South Carolina so I had to go visit. I went into this classroom and was surprised to see the “Cursive alphabet border” around the top of the classroom. I asked the teacher “Are you guys teaching cursive again?” And she said they were, and that they HAD to for the kids to be able to read anything more than a few years old. This was around 2020.

[Pappy Smear]

My gosh .... when and why did they ever take it away???

So I substitute teach in a high school. I never see cursive. Last week I did, and I asked the girl about it. She said she taught herself because "she thought it would be fun to do".

I hadn't really thought much about cursive until I saw it, and I asked her if she ever studied it in elementary school. She told me when classes went remote for covid, they stopped teaching it during remote lessons. And then she said when they came back to the classroom, they decided not to start it back up. (per your question, that is the answer from one school district in Iowa)

[eyedigress]

I enjoyed reading about you and Mrs. Big Truck.
Cursive is discipline of the language.

I’m just an old radar guy from the cold war.

[MayflowerMadam]

“when and why did they ever take it away???”

I heard about it between five and ten years ago when my great nieces weren’t learning it.

My conspiracy theory is that TPTB wanted to make it impossible for young people coming up to read founding documents and similar.

[MayflowerMadam]

“I can write BACKWARDS in cursive.”

I taught myself to do that when I was bored in college classes. Don’t think I could do it now.

[BradyLS]

Well, they were both in black-and-white and had trains. But World War Two had airplanes and tanks. So it had to be later.

[kvanbrunt2]

There are good reasons for this. eye hand coordenation, thinking skills to interpret, teaching grammar and logic. etc.>>. And you can walk into the philosophical society building next to independence hall. you can read the actual letters Ben Franklyn wrote to George Whitfield that started the orphan boys school which became the university of Pennsylvania. The reason they don’t teach cursive writing is to prevent students from being able to read it. if they can’t read it, they will never know real history.

[kvanbrunt2]

I have t used cursive since the 9th grade. I print everything now - and that’s hard enough to read as it is.>>> The reason they don’t teach them to write it is to prevent them from being able to read it. The letters of English and American history of actual people. Locke, Washington, Franklin are written. The constitution, declaration of independence, etc.

[kvanbrunt2]

People the reason they don’t teach them to write it is so they can’t read it.

[frank ballenger]

Ha. Clever reasoning.

NYT
Survey Finds Teenagers Ignorant on Basic History...
The New York Times

Feb 27, 2008 — The survey results, released on Tuesday, demonstrate that a significant proportion of teenagers live in “stunning ignorance” of history and literature.
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another type of survey:
The questions aren’t particularly difficult. They consist of things like naming any one of the three branches of government, how many US senators there are, and naming a right or freedom guaranteed by the First Amendment. Rock-bottom, basic stuff.
...
Frankly, it was to correct a profound national embarrassment: more than 96 percent of immigrants seeking naturalization pass the test—a rate that Americans at-large are nowhere near matching. Only 13 percent, in one survey, knew when the US Constitution was ratified, for example. Most couldn’t say which countries the US fought in World War II; only one in four could even say why American colonists fought a war against Great Britain. Unsurprisingly, older Americans have the easiest time of it, with 74 percent answering at least six in 10 questions correctly. Among those under the age of 45, only one in five pass, which says a lot about the debased standards of common knowledge expected of students in US schools, whose founding purpose was to prepare ordinary people for self-government.

It is hard to overstate what a low bar the citizenship test represents.
https://www.aei.org/education/students-lack-of-basic-knowledge-of-us-history-and-civics-remains-a-national-embarrassment/#:~:text=A%20new%20study%20from%20a,high%20school%20graduation%20requirement%20does

[rlmorel]

I could never write cursive. Just couldn't. I didn't have the motor control at that crucial young age (using the thick round pencils and yellow pads with the alternating solid and dotted lines.

I got terrible grades in handwriting, and darn, I tried. Just couldn't do it.

Fortunately for me, my dad didn't ever write in cursive either, he developed a solid block print that was clean, clear, and readable, and when I was in third grade, I began trying to copy the way he wrote.

It is how I have always written, and still write to this day.

Funny story-when I was in the Navy back in the Seventies, I was advised by an older sailor: "If you don't write any letters, you won't get any letters."

I was homesick as hell, and every mail call on the ship was a time of high excitement. So I began to write letters to all my friends back home, and when there wasn't anything going on, no flight ops or we were in port and I wasn't working, I wrote letters. I could write ten letters at a sitting.

Flash forward 25 years, and I was into computers. I found a company that could make a font that looked like your handwriting. My solid block printing style was well suited, and the font (which I still use today) is nearly indistinguishable from my handwriting, with one specific exception:

The font makes the lines too straight. Here is a sample, one is the font, one is my real handwriting:

But I use it for any personal correspondence, cards and such. One of my retirement goals is to write more letters instead of email. (I make my own cards from my own photography) using pictures like this on the front of the cards:

I use the font for all my Christmas cards and such, because I have a hard time writing more than a sentence or two anyway.

I sent a Christmas Card to a gal I used to write lots of letters to when I was in the Navy, and when my wife and I had dinner with her a while back, she said after she got my card: "I forgot how neat and clean your handwriting always was! It looks the same today as it did back then!" (I did tell her it was a font!)

All that said: I absolutely admire people with quality cursive handwriting, and I envy the skill. Too late for me to learn now!

"Ain't nobody got time for that!" (I still laugh when I see that!)

[Justa]

Because it’s for quill pens which aren’t used anymore.

The whole point of cursive is to keep the quill in contact with the paper so it doesn’t drip an ink drop onto the paper.

[rlmorel]

Hahaha, I’m a little slow tonight, and just realized as soon as I posted, that by using that sentence “The Quick Brown Fox Jumps Over The Lazy Brown Dog!” I was providing the world with the exact letters they would need to replicate my handwriting perfectly!

My forehead still hurts from where I just smacked it!

I had to edit the image to remove it and wrote “Ooops!” instead...

[rlmorel]

I get that image completely, as you can probably surmise from my post above!

[Penelope Dreadful]

Damned Liberals!!!

People and kids curse too much already!Now they gonna make ‘em write it down for Posterity???

[combat_boots]

Cool

[Windcatcher]

I went exclusively to Catholic school in PA so cursive was ALWAYS required. I actually won the monthly cursive award once (no one was more surprised than me). This is very welcome news.

“But Ebonics!”

Tough S**T. Learn cursive and STFU.