Why the Education Establishment Hates Cursive

American Thinker ^ | December 23, 2016 | Bruce Deitrick Price

[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."

[NicknamedBob]

Very gracious of you. The Mr. “Yaw”, to whom Mr. Edwards was “responding”, was George Bernard Shaw, who had suggested some modest reforms to English orthography. I am inordinately fond of modest proposals.

[antidisestablishment]

Being Irish, I’m fond of modest proposals, myself.

[VietVet]

I know what you mean. At my age, my hands shake so much with palsy, that my handwriting (and printing and drawing) is hard to make out. Very sad for someone whose hobbies included calligraphy and drawing my own Christmas cards.