To Cursive or Not to Cursive

So...there I was. I had mowed what is left of my lawn, weeded the old flowerbed on the west side of the house, knocked a couple of items off of the wife's perpetual 'list of things that will only take five minutes to do', and the day was effectively over. Worse than that, I was out of beer.

I then thought I might hit the pool for a few laps but since the water temperature in the pool was two degrees higher than the air temperature outside here in sunny Clearwater Florida, the idea of a dip was less than attractive. Long story short, I was casting about for something I could do to kill time before supper. On a whim I decided to tune in the six o'clock follies and see if there was anything remotely resembling what was advertised as news. Today I was in luck.

I forget who the commentator was, not that it really mattered. Here in Florida, and to be fair in many other locations as well, we have an assortment of lacquered, and powdered fully animated mannequins, some male, some female that have all purchased their hair from Owens Corning and all faithfully stick to the fully massaged script on their teleprompters. (I'm not supposed to discuss politics but that is just like the president does when the cameras are rolling.)

Anyway, listening in I was shocked to learn that there is a movement afoot to eliminate cursive writing as an item of curriculum in our schools and yes, even though we are not discussing politics this is something that goes right back to 'no child left behind' which as you will remember also means 'no child moves ahead'. Budget cuts, smaller class sizes, standardized tests and God help any teacher attempting originality or otherwise deviating from the banal.

The rationale, and we are nothing if not rationalistic in anything operated by governments, is that the teaching of cursive writing is time consuming, particularly with students that already know how to print block letters, or simply recognize those symbols enough to press keys on a computer or cell phone.

HELLO!!!

Yes boys and girls; they are actually touting just that. What I am hearing though is that teaching cursive is just too hard. After all, children have cell phones, and computers, so why do they need to 'write' anything?

Well how about a signature? Maybe notes during a lecture? That always comes in handy at test time. How about a quick note to that cute girl in the second row? E-Mail leaves a paper trail guys. It might be handy to know cursive...

Teaching it is hard though. The teachers do have a point. And let's not forget all the time they need to teach students how to pass those standardized tests like FCAT.

'No Child Moves Ahead'.


Now I don't know about you but as I recall school it was first learn block printing in first and second grade, maybe even third,) and then move on to cursive writing around the fourth grade. And yes, if it was time consuming for me as a student, I can easily surmise that with thirty eight students in my grade school class, it must have been even more time consuming for Sister Michael and Sister Joan, and all the other equally patient good Sisters of Saint Joseph. Still they persevered.

We, as students, were a captive audience of course but what the hell, we persevered too and practiced and practiced, ad neauseam.

We had inkwells with ink in them and stoppers. We had blotters and quill pens with changeable nibs and later we had fountain pens too. I even remember those horrible cartridge pens that sometimes worked and usually leaked.(Washable Blue, my ass...)

There were ink smudges galore, ruined shirts and you had to keep dipping the quill tips as they would only hold so much ink and yet through it all, we learned cursive. We were even graded on it. Some of us got decent grades, most of us though had terrible handwriting.

Once we had all got with the program it was evident even to anyone that cursive was a lot faster than block printing, a whole lot faster. Hell, even the Romans wrote in cursive. Oh not that stuff chiseled into places like Trajan's Column. The Romans used cursive for nearly everything else though. It just worked and obviously their instructors had time to teach.

Still, opponents of cursive tout that it is sometimes hard to read as not everyone possesses the ability to write cursive legibly. They do have a point and they further expand that point to state that important documents should be printed in block letters for legibility. That is certainly a valid position and I agree...at least partially. After all, no one would write something important, e.g. a document that was intended to last for a long time in cursive. Would they? In particular would they work the official document in cursive when they already possessed a printed copy?

They might. Or if they did we would have to infer that perhaps they simply couldn't print worth a shit. Men like Timothy Matlack and Jacob Shallus for instance. Yes...I'm quite certain they were better at cursive.