Posted on 12/23/2016 5:03:55 AM PST by Kaslin
Modern educators are dismissive of cursive. Indeed, many are hostile to such a degree that you should immediately suspect that they are up to something.
Here is an education journalist providing the Party Line: "Cursive writing is an anachronism. Spending any classroom time on it is comparable to teaching how to use an abacus: it's interesting as a history lesson, and probably offers some side benefits, but it is not at all practical as a day-to-day skill in the modern, connected world."
A professor of education argues: "Cursive should be allowed to die. In fact, it's already dying, despite having been taught for decades." (You can depend on education professors to confuse "decades" with "centuries.")
When you read such swaggering attacks on cursive, you might assume that the question is settled. The old geezer is dead, so take him off life support. You rarely see thoughtful praise of cursive. Even people who are sentimentally inclined to support cursive can't think of many reasons to do so.
I propose a higher truth: the Education Establishment is always a reliable guide to what is good. If our socialist professors rail against X, you know that X is educational gold. Here are eight reasons why cursive is valuable and we should fight to keep it in the classroom:
1) LEARN TO READ FASTER. The main thing is that learning cursive accelerates learning to read. If it did nothing else, this alone would still make it a huge asset. Cursive obviously makes a child more aware of letter forms and how words are spelled. Don Potter, the phonics guru, states: "Any attempt to educate American children that neglects the direct development of fluent handwriting is doomed to fail. The little dribble of handwriting done with the typical phonics programs is FAR below optimal."
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
The Constitution is written in cursive, as are other important founding documents.
No can read, no can understand and appreciate, no can follow - easy to enslave.
NWO enslavement is the bottom line.
I always thought it was our founding documents. They say they want to educate you, but the dems are up to their old slavery tricks of withholding real education to keep you in chains. Source documents from our founding were written in cursive.
They are trying to destroy it because such a large portion of our ‘diverse’ society don’t ever take the time to learn it, or just cannot learn it. Cursive, when well learned and practiced, actually speeds up putting words down on paper. To be proficient at it takes practice, as does typing correctly. Muscle memory has to be permanently established, but in the end it is faster than block printing.
Not all documents are in type form, we have family docs that are in old English, that are a hard slog going through, all in very fancy cursive of the time period.
Cursive will always be needed. I can write easier in cursive than print with arthritic hands. Today’s under educated edijits can’t read even my print and don’t know how to read cursive.
Bump
Modern (leftist) educators are like Demonicrats. They steal oxygen and exhale lies.
Well, have you tried to actually read some of those early documents? I learned cursive in the 50s. But I do genealogy and I can’t read most of those early documents. Just saying. I think it should continue to be taught but I actually don’t use it much anymore. My penmanship skills were never very good and like my calculating skills have deteriorated since technology gave me other ways to do it.
I would agree with that, that it can be faster. That makes sense.
I have never been able to develop a cursive handwriting past what I was taught in elementary school back in the early Sixties. I just couldn’t get the hang of it.
I admire people who can do it, and I enjoy looking at a document written cursively in a nice hand with no mistakes. I find that impressive.
Perfect !!! Who can’t remember her !!!
For several years (recently) I did some substitute teaching in a good Catholic school. Every class when I would write instructions on the board in cursive, there would be several students who would say that they couldn’t read it. I’m sure it had nothing to do with my writing. ;-)
Take away their gadgets and crap that need batteries to function and those “snowflakes” will be unable to do math, write letters, checks (which might be a good thing) or apply for welfare. We are raising a nation of idiots!
Cursive is a waste of time. I agree with the educational establishment.
Given the video game pandemic, I find this snippet from the article intuitively true: Few children build models anymore
LOVED building models as a kid (50s-60s) !
Fighter planes were très cool, warships always a challenge, and you simply couldn't do NASA stuff without a sense of awe & pride.
(not to mention Estes rockets .. whoooooosh ! :-)
When I was in the military (68-76), there was no email or internet. The only printed communications I had for work were teletype machines as part of my job. So, most of my personal communications were via cursive letter. I guess that’s where I got my post high school practice.
You’re right, but don’t assume it isn’t deliberate. Our elites need people to clean their homes, watch their children, serve their food, etc.
We are raising a nation of unskilled, uneducated drones. The goal is not to get all of them on welfare (someone needs to do the work above); the goal is to maintain this caste a tiny bit better than the non-working Welfarians to motivate them.
I have had surgery on both of my hands, and I have difficulty writing more than a paragraph or two, and I can see the legibility, even with block printing, devolve as I write. My hand just seems to freeze up and become a claw.
But I found a great solution-there was a company years ago that could make a font out of your handwriting. I think it cost me $100-$200, and I had to fill out a form.
It is very cool. Looks EXACTLY like my handwriting, the only dead giveaway is that is just TOO neat.
When I was in the Navy, I made a practice of writing 5-10 letters a day when I could find the time...I subscribed to the theory that if you don’t send any letters, you won’t get any, so I wrote a lot.
I had a woman who I used to write to a lot when I was in, and just recently sent her a letter printed in a card from my handwriting font. (I like to use dictation software when I can, and coupled with a bunch of Adobe Illustrator card templates, I can put out a nice letter in short order, and nobody I know was the wiser that it was typed (or dictated).
Anyway, when I saw the woman at a party, she thanked me for the letter, and said “I forgot just how neat and legible your handwriting was...you are lucky to be able to write like that...”
I spilled the beans to her, but wondered if there was a way to program in some random inconsistency to make it even more indistinguishable...:)
I always wondered why they just didn’t teach shorthand instead of a slightly different and slightly faster version of the same language.
FReegards
Cursive is obsolete for the simple reason that writing is obsolete.
Various and sundry key boards have made writing obsolete as communication is electronic not on paper. As a matter of fact, paper is obsolete except as a receptacle for hard copy that must be printed out.
Adobe Acrobat has become so prevalent and so easy to use and perform so many functions that paper is just not relevant
Time spent teaching keyboard usage is better than cursive writing
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