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 ...
“1) LEARN TO READ FASTER. The main thing is that learning cursive accelerates learning to read.”
“2) HIGHER I.Q. Reading itself has unexpected benefits. Namely, it makes you smarter.”
“3) PRECISION. Cursive requires that young students do something precisely. Not sloppily, not incompletely, not according to personal whim.”
“4) FINE MOTOR SKILLS. Even detractors of phonics acknowledge that it teaches fine motor skills.”
“5) CALLIGRAPHY. This word, which is almost pure Greek, means beautiful writing. Learning cursive introduces a child to the world of logos, type design, and graphic design generally.”
“6) HISTORY. When children learn cursive, they can read the Declaration of Independence and many other historical documents.”
“7) INDIVIDUAL SIGNATURES. Cursive allows for personal expression. A person’s signature is nearly as unique as a fingerprint.”
“8) TAKING NOTES. Handwriting is faster than printing. That was the main reason they developed it.”
“Apparently, 15 minutes a day is all it takes to learn cursive. Now, that’s a bargain, readily and cheaply available for every child in America. A mere 15 minutes a day will result in higher I.Q., faster and better reading, a greater appreciation of the aesthetic aspects of type, faster note-taking, one’s very own signature, more coordinated fingers, and the ability to find out what Thomas Jefferson is famous for. “
I would argue slightly differently, that "Writing cursive requires a higher form of intelligence than what liberals believe you ought to be allowed to possess."
Relying on someone else to read and then type anything for me is dangerous. Word omissions or additions and placement of things like commas, colons, semi colons, etc. are critical to full understanding
Cursive is actually far less effort than block printing. You don’t have to start, stop, lift the pen, drop the pen, just a loose grip and light wrist action will do. I’m just old enough to have been taught cursive and to have used it through school prior to college, but upon graduation emerged into a world adopting desktop computers. I was also trained to use a stylized block print on sketches, proposals, hand-drawn graphics and such in design school.
One should point out here that cursive is not a font. There are cursive and non-cursive fonts.
Learning cursive is extremely important for children and some adults. Learning fonts not so much.
“You don’t have to sign for anything?” LOL you should see my signature. It’s pretty much a scribble that maybe is an M but in the last six years I added a tiny fish at the end to show my faith. Since I’m left handed and the world is right handed my handwriting has always been deplorable. I finally just embraced it to the point where now when I go back and try to read my notes on a trial or a seminar, I can hardly understand what they say. My own notes. haha.
In my world, not only is cursive writing obsolete having been totally replaced with e mail and Word, but the telephone is near obsolete. All my clients have telephones but don’t answer them and if you want contact e mail is the best.
Further, lettering, once the pride of many engineers is totally obsolete because all “drawings” are computer generated and rendered in 3 D if desired. Tablet computers and the cloud accessible via wi fi allows me to access drawings in the field, in Charlotte, stored on computers in Mumbai. There is absolutely no place for cursive in this situation.
I’m old and can both write in cursive and Letter but the need for either just no longer exists
No. Reading and writing cursive saves time compared to printing.
Ah to write in cursive-a blessing. I am left handed and am afraid my penmanship teachers gave up on me (mid to late 50’s). But I can read cursive!
Funny...when I went in the service at the age of 18, I didn’t really have a “signature”. I would just “sign” things in cursive, but if someone else had the same name as me and had taken the same handwriting courses I had taken, our signatures might look identical.
After being in boot camp at Great Lakes for several weeks, I had to sign so many things that my signature developed then and there.
Now, my signature is completely unreadable...:)
We went to a florist to buy flowers for a recently deceased relative. The young girl waiting on us could not read the name of the deceased as it was in cursive. I was floored! So we printed it out. She continued to impress us with her total ignorance of flower arrangements for a funeral. And she seemed to be perfectly proud of being stupid.
I think this non-cursive business the left is pushing is simply another way to divide us, and also by dumbing down the youngins.
Any business that has to communicate with the public in person should not hire these little pukes.
Are you a lefty?
I agree as well. Some things become obsolete over time and are not worth the time to learn relative to other subjects that have more relevance in a contemporary society. I see cursive as one of these, even though it is still a useful skill.
I thought the 8 arguments FOR cursive in the article were pretty weak. They were mostly about reading vs. fluent handwriting.
Granted, rather than teach something more useful than cursive in the digital age, the hard left educational establishment will instead fill the replaced curriculum with even more useless left wing propaganda and indoctrination - like glowbull warming or revisionist history. However, that doesn't have anything to do with the pro/con cursive discussion as a standalone issue. Cursive should be part of an elective course and no longer required, similar to Latin and other curriculum that used to be mainstream but only has limited value these days.
My hand printing is lousy and I hate it if I have to fill out forms in print.
They hate ‘cursive’ because it stands for individuality. Each person’s handwriting is tailored for their individual hand eye coordination.
Group-think leftists despise the individual, ergo, individual handwriting excellence is persona non grata in their world............
The gorilla birthday thread was yesterday.................
yes
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.”
Properly revised:
“Marxist writing is an anachronism. Spending any classroom time on it is comparable to reading drivel from the 50 IQ ape Karl Marx. It’s interesting as a history lesson, but offers no benefits other than to identify vapid communist trolls among us. It is not at all practical as a skill.”
I always wondered why they just didn’t teach shorthand instead...
****************
When I was a kid my mother used to torture us every Christmas ... the gift list was right there on the refrigerator IN SHORTHAND...
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.