underwhelmedandoverstimulated:
underwhelmedandoverstimulated:
On one hand I understand not teaching cursive in school anymore, because it actually is slower than regular handwriting and almost everything is typed on a keyboard now anyways.
On the other hand, so much of our (even recent!) history was written in cursive, and having a whole generation of kids who can’t read letters written by their grandparents, momentos saved by their great-grandparents, or even photo albums from theur immediate family seems like a dangerously quick way to detach us from previous generations.
And on the third, related but slightly malformed hand, I feel bad that yet another form of small, everyday art that brings joy in the middle of mundane tasks, which celebrates personality and individual style and self-expression, is about to fade into obscurity because it wasn’t efficient enough for today’s world to put up with.
Like… if we continue to whittle away the small arts out of every day life, what’s going to be left except stark, ruthless pragmatism?
Maybe writing a grocery list is less mundane when you get to feel elegant for a moment. Maybe you’re a little more proud of what you write when you see it flow together like a painting
Now, I fully admit that this is me remembering what I was told in 3rd grade when we learned cursive, but I was told cursive is faster than normal. (For someone proficient)
In theory it is, and my writing is actually a little bit of a mix. But it’s the way it gets used by assholes with authority to find one more thing to get kids, usually neurologist kids, in trouble. I remember being in school when it was mandatory to teach and learn, and I remember the fear and dread associated with “and everything in that teacher’s class HAS to be in CURSIVE or she’ll give you a ZERO”. Zero credit for an essay that took hours, because I focused on writing it with good content instead of doing the fancy loopy loops that take me, a relatively new and non-proficient learner, much longer. I was terrified of this. And terrified of getting in trouble for “refusing” to “follow the rules”. For writing in the wrong font.
It shouldn’t be something that can get you in trouble or a bad grade. If I wanted to get graded on my handwriting, I’d take calligraphy, not 6th grade social studies.
Yea, absolutely on that pressure; I was lucky, in that I only had to suffer one year of that “everything has to be in cursive” stuff before they gave up.
I just wanted to make sure I wasn’t harboring false information from being taught wrong in school.
It’s interesting how different this is approached in different places.
We were taught cursive as the default for writing. It was just the way you always wrote. “Non-cursive letters are for reading and cursive for writing”, we were told. The word ‘non-cursive’ translated to our language and back is literally the word 'printed’ while the word 'cursive’ translated and back is literally the word 'written’. We were never really forced to use it after the end of the single teacher for all subjects era of schooling in the day to day, but most people still use it because it is far faster than pulling up your writing utensil several times per letter once for every stroke. Some switched to non-cursive and some even to latin alphabet letters, but most did not.
Our three times a grade special essays in our native language, in a second language (English), and in a third language (most often German) that we have to write in school are the only ones that require cursive. So we have to learn four alphabets and four cursives, two of each for the native.
Though these often overlap, since English and one of the native language alphabets are guaranteed to be latin with the only differences being half a dozen letters and the most often third (German) also being latin. Their cursives do vary a bit more though
No one really complains, though our English teacher was forced to just allow us to write in non-cursive one time because we don’t really get much practice with English cursive and were being too slow to finish on time.