Should Cursive be Saved?
Is cursive going the way of the icebox and buggy whip? Common core standards in education are crowding out classroom time for cursive instruction. While many may say in this day and age of technology that keyboards fill the communication void, there are strong advocates of keeping cursive in schools.
Making the Case for Cursive gives two excellent examples on the real-world impact of not teaching cursive. Cursive is more efficient. People can write faster in cursive than they can print.
But it isn’t just writing in cursive. During the process of learning to write in script, students also learn to read cursive. In this summer’s George Zimmerman trial over the death of Treyvon Martin, witness Rachel Jeantel, age 19, was unable to read a key piece of evidence – a letter written in cursive.
Where do you stand on the cursive in the classrooms debate?
For third-grade pupils at Triadelphia Ridge Elementary School in suburban Ellicott City, an hour’s drive from Washington, learning to write joined-up letters is a no-brainer. But outside the classroom, grown-up Americans are debating whether the nation’s children should be studying cursive at all, in an era of swift and profound technological change.
The swirling lines from Linden Bateman’s pen have been conscripted into a national fight to keep cursive writing in American classrooms. “Modern research indicates that more areas of the human brain are engaged when children use cursive handwriting than when they keyboard,” said Bateman, who handwrites 125 ornate letters each year. “We’re not thinking this through. It’s beyond belief to me that states have allowed cursive to slip from the standards.”
“When the new Common Core educational standards were crafted, penmanship classes were dropped,” reports the Associated Press. “But at least seven of the 45 states that adopted the standards are fighting to restore the cursive instruction.”
In the 17th and 18th centuries, the average person had minimal education and could not read or write. As late as the early 20th century, vast numbers of people still could not even sign their name. For the past 20 years, schools have been continually de-emphasizing the teaching of cursive writing to students.