Sad: Kids Don't Learn Cursive Penmanship Anymore

I've never found a single reason to write in cursive. Ever. I write all the time. Despite being a total techie... I find that written notebooks are an invaluable tool in my work. Keeping good notes has become one of the single greatest tools that I have in my arsenal.

Truth is, while I respect, admire, and appreciate decorative scripture... I see no functional value in it. Legible, and functional is all I care about for my use case. But, I can see how for MANY other people it would be a valuable skill set.

More and more I am seeing schools ( especially public ) dropping CORE curriculum having dropped everything else already. It's a sad state of affairs. And to be blunt I find it to be telling of our educational systems utter failure.

I admit that I rarely write in cursive anymore but many of my female friends still do. Has anyone gotten a multimillion dollar foundation or federal grant to study this gender gap in penmanship?

What about signatures? Is a printed signature even worth a damn?

Signatures are different. You can make a primitive drawing of a turd and as long as its consistent, its your signature.

True. A signature need not be legible at all. Plenty of people throughout history have had illegible ones. Why would anyone think that a signature should be written only in the penmanship taught in school? If that were the case, they would be ridiculously easy to forge.

i remember feeling really stupid in elementary school b/c i never had the motor skills to do cursive right. but then i learned to type in junior high, and at stuy, we were all required to learn how to learn how to print in drafting letters (block roman capitals) for drafting class (two terms were required! it was a throwback to when stuy was a technical school.) so today, whenever i'm not typing, i write in kind of an all capital letters script. it works fine!

@Whammo Lmao. The most elegant communication system there is.

Speaking is really overrated too. No reason why they shouldn't just grunt and point at things they want.

Apparently, so is grammar. You seem to have left out a "there's" at the beginning of your second sentence in your race to be snarky. Typing is perfectly suitable as a substitute for writing. Both can use exactly the same words and structure. Not so with your straw man argument.

In fact, since most people can type much faster than they can write, it's obvious from an efficiency viewpoint that cursive is a skill best left in the past while we focus on the truly important aspects, mainly what they're writing rather than how they're writing it. Or maybe you think we should forgo ballpoint pens in favor of returning to dipping quill pens in inkwells.

I learned the Palmer method of penmanship in Catholic school in the 50's. Handwriting tells a lot about a person. Its an interesting skill to learn very young. Its personal and artful and gives a sense of confidence. Not to mention that it connects you to words and language in a much different way than typing, and that's not bad.

I would say it is.

Kids should be taught to physically express their ideas in as many forms as time would allow.

Speaking of time, I also hear schools have stopped teaching kids how to read analog clocks. No good.