Why do they bother to teach us cursive in school?
Whether or not anyone can dream up any possible value for it in the course of an internet discussion thread, the answer is: NO, it should not continue to be taught. I also remember hour upon hour of mind-numbing tracing, repetition, repetition, tracing, repetition… and being graded on it. What an asinine waste of time. From what I recall teachers saying, it was supposed to be faster and more sophisticated (but only if you could get it *right* hence the hours of repetition). They should teach typing now, if anything. I use a pen once a month, to write my rent check, and I wouldn’t even have to do that if I bothered to work around it.
Good lord — it’s useful. I just came back from a professional conference which involved several long, information-packed sessions at which I wanted to capture a great deal of what was said. It also involved site visits at which I took a lot of notes and did some sketching of exhibit styles. If I couldn’t write cursive, I would have missed a tremendous amount of information. Laptops are nice — but I type faster than most people, and I still type slower than I write. Plus, typing’s noisy, and also it’s not possible to work on a laptop while wandering through a field site. All the practice in cursive is to build spinal memory that will stay with you through life, so that at any point you’ll be able to write smoothly and quickly with minimal concentration on the physical act. It’s not so essential as an adult that you write the Palmer method, or whatever; it’s just essential that you’ve evolved a fluid, fast, readable style.
Are you left-handed, dame? I think you are being pretty blithe in your dismissal of the problems cursive (in the form I learned) causes lefties. Tell you what, how about we try a lefty-slanted cursive, and see how much uproar it would cause, and whether you would like being forced to do it? It’d be great to have an alternate reality machine to make you experience it. Suddenly this tool you love and cherish could become the albatross around your neck, and I think you’d change your mind. Afroblanca is right: the result is the ends, not the means, here. Being failed for trivial details is stupid. That’s not a problem of just cursive, but any need to learn cursive is not a defense of that. Can my teacher read my paper? That is what matters. Not superficial details. Admitting that has nothing to do with saying cursive should or should not be taught. Indeed, if it should be taught, a different system should be seriously considered, especially if you think cursive is important, as you seem to
So cursive can be used to put you in jail. Good reason for it.As well as establish legitimacy of documents, protect you from identity theft and fraud, and enable people to identify authors of documents. Interesting how you assume identity equates with jailtime. Just as children need to progress through certain movements in infancy to develop areas of their brain, certain parts of cursive writing can stimulate the brain as well. If that’s true, and Mexico doesn’t teach cursive writing, then we would expect all Mexicans educated in Mexico to be functionally retarded. Is this so?If you read what I wrote, you would notice that I said it can stimulate the brain, not that it was required to avoid being “functionally retarded.” It was in response to the statement that it was of little benefit. Cursive handwriting allows for increased speed, better spelling, and it has more character. Perhaps some who are so hostile to cursive writing have a
school is all about how to behave in society: shut up, sit down, and do what you’re told. Almost. (In my experience), school is where people teach you how to behave in society while pretending they are teaching you other, loftier things. I’m not sure why they feel this lie is necessary. generally schools don’t teach you vocational things because the world teaches you vocational things. In a perfect world, maybe we’d all learn vocational and life skills from our parents. Most of us don’t. Most of us arrive at adulthood clueless as to how to run our finances, clueless about sex, clueless about fixing simple machinery if it breaks downs, etc. School is the place for learning things that are worthwhile but whose uses are not obvious. Sort of. But you can only do this (wonderful) sort of education in an environment centered around exploration and fun. You can’t teach Shakespeare by forcing it on people. All you do is create a generation of people who hate Shakespeare. In general, teaching “
