The title above is a fan page on Facebook with, at present, over 764,000 fans (or "likes" as they're now called). If we ignore the painful comma splice, it accurately states the attitude of millions of Americans.
A feature article in today's New York Times points out that, although most schools still teach third graders to write in cursive, third grade is the final contact that most students will ever have with the skill. Some people nowadays can't even sign their own name in cursive.
An education professor lamented:
“These kids are losing time where they create beauty every day,” Professor Christen said. “But it’s hard for me to make a practical argument for it. I’m not one who’s mourning it because of that; I’m mourning the beauty, the aesthetics.”
Ah, c'mon. Let's not get carried away.
I also learned to write cursive in third grade. At first, I was pleased, because I could now read the written comments on my report card (and formulate my defenses), before I turned the card over to my parents. But in my school, we continued to have sporadic penmanship classes through sixth grade. I soon learned to hate them.
I hated them, first of all, because they made us write with what were called "library pens," nibs on a stick that had to be repeatedly dipped in ink. This process was only one step beyond the use of quill pens. It is impossible for a fifth grade boy to write cursive, using a scratchy pen that he dips in liquid ink, without smearing the ink all over his fingers, the side of his palm, and -- consequently -- the page on which he is writing. And if you think I had problems, talk to the left-handers in our class.
But beyond the mechanics, cursive -- as we were taught it -- was not a thing of "beauty." The capital letters were archaic, with the "S" looking a bit like a treble cleft, and the "Q" looking like the number "2." The small letters, written in a continuous, fluid line, looked like a series of waves upon a body of water. This was the "Palmer" method of penmanship.
And even worse than the style we were taught were the exercises we were forced to endure, exercises deemed necessary to perfect the style: long sequences of overlapping circles, and repetitive up and down strokes.
The process of becoming an adult included the process of simplfying this imposed style of writing, until -- by the end of high school -- you finally were back to writing printed letters, some of which were tied together in various ways of your own choosing. In college, when I saw an occasional fellow student still writing in the unmodified Palmer method, I concluded to myself that here was a fellow without much initiative or ability to break away from dictated absurdities.
Except for writing checks and scratching out an occasional note to yourself, handwriting in any form with an actual pen or pencil is increasingly unusual. Keyboarding allows you to write almost as fast as you can think, and more and more people have a laptop or an iPad within reach at all times. Traditional Palmer cursive will still interest some folks as an art form, I suppose, a style of calligraphy (although teaching yourself the far more attractive italic style of penmanship would seem to me far more satisfaying). But to require all students to learn cursive when available classtime is already in such short supply seems a poor allocation of resources.
Third grade teachers didn't "lie" when they assured students that cursive would always prove useful. They simply accepted without reflection the simple truths they had been taught in schools of education, and failed to foresee the future.
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