Posted on 06/28/2013 1:29:33 PM PDT by TigerClaws
A single sentence, uttered in the trial of George Zimmerman for the shooting of teenager Trayvon Martin, has catapulted an issue into the national spotlight.
When asked if she could read a letter in court, witness Rachel Jeantel, her head bowed, murmured with embarrassment, "I don't read cursive," according to court testimony.
Is it any surprise that cursive -- the looped, curvaceous style of handwriting that's been a mainstay of education for generations -- is all but dead? [15 Weird Things We Do Everyday, and Why]
"Cursive should be allowed to die. In fact, it's already dying, despite having been taught for decades," Morgan Polikoff, assistant professor of education at the University of Southern California's Rossier School of Education, told The New York Times.
(Excerpt) Read more at cbsnews.com ...
Correct. It is important and was at one time a part of the curriculum in Oregon’s public schools.
Cursive is White Privilege.
Script fonts are racist
That may not make any sense, but I'm a very good writer as an adult -- and I attribute it partially to the care I took as a kid when writing by hand as carefully as possible to avoid mistakes, avoid crossing things out, etc.
Homeschoolers, in general, have their children learning cursive at least by 3rd grade, and usually sooner.
There are good reasons for it, as you have stated.
Somehow I don’t think people using cursive is going to stop that. It was an annoying and post dated thing when I had to learn it in the 70s, and now there’s computers making it even MORE post dated.
“The elephant in the room that CBS ignored is that, if the witness can’t read it, she must not have written it.”
Look! Let’s end this fallacy! It has been acknowledged and testified to, that she did NOT write the letter! A “friend” did. She can probably only read twitter talk.
“Cussive” writing on Twitter is the new fashion.
That is one ugly word picture you paint there, TC. Another one for the "Sad But True" file, I guess.
[[Rachel Jeantel, her head bowed, murmured with embarrassment, “I don’t read cursive,”]]
Yeeeeeah- cuz cursive letters look so much diffint dan regula lettahs... oh wait, no they don’ts
Sooooo....how are folks supposed to read handwritten documents of the past if they can’t read cursive?
I can’t stand to print.
Yup, same here. Doing crosswords in pen also helped.
You’re being facetious, I know, but you point out one of the tenets of the Humanist religion -
nothing from the past has any value, so why bother reading about it.
It’s criminal, in my opinion, but no, cursive is not taught today. Most of my students do not know how to read it — but I still use it! (It’s good for them to see it and in my opinion, it should be taught — along with spelling and grammar!) Too much reliance on modern technology is part of the problem, but programs like “spell check” will not tell a student whether or not they used a word correctly: there, their, or they’re?
[[One teacher who was trying to do it on the sly got in trouble for it, and he had to stop.]]
What the hell was the teacher charged with? Illegally tryign to improve her student’s comunication skills?
Writing will soon be dead, as well.
P.S. This is a photo of a page from an Ethiopian Bible manuscript.
Um...I heard that letter that she couldn’t read the “cursive writing” on, was a letter she had claimed to have written herself. So, that being, does that mean she can’t read her own hand writing?
What an azzhoe
I started printing when I was a freshman or sophomore in high school.
In the early days of slavery, men like George Whitefield encouraged people to teach slaves to read because they were expected to be freed at some point and they would need to be educated and self sufficient.
By the time we got to the civil war era, the democrats were making it illegal to teach slaves to read because ignorance is slavery. They’re doing the same today.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.