FULLERTON, California (Reuters) - A generation of children who learned to write on screens is now going old school.
Starting this year, California grade school students are required to learn cursive handwriting, after the skill had fallen out of fashion in the computer age.
Assembly Bill 446, sponsored by former elementary school teacher Sharon Quirk-Silva and signed into law in October, requires handwriting instruction for the 2.6 million Californians in grades one to six, roughly ages 6 to 12, and cursive lessons for the “appropriate” grade levels - generally considered to be third grade and above.
Experts say learning cursive improves cognitive development, reading comprehension and fine motor skills, among other benefits. Some educators also find value in teaching children to read historic documents and family letters from generations past.
As a left-handed kid in school, cursive was a bit of a nightmare.
As a student of history who has seen countless beautiful examples of medieval calligraphy, chancery scripts, and renaissance typography, modern school cursive is a fucking abomination. It was developed neither for speed nor beauty nor legibility, but to reduce the amount of ink dripping from cheap dip pens when they were lifted from the page between strokes.
The danger in making a virtue of necessity is that some people will continue to fetishize it long after the necessity has passed.
The issue with not being able to at least read cursive handwriting is receiving a letter or looking at an old document and/or signatures written in cursive, in perfect English, and being like, “I don’t know what this says.”
It’s like having a mild illiteracy. Pointless or not, I’d feel like an idiot if I couldn’t decipher these common things.
I learned cursive in school, I still can’t read it. The nature of cursive is that only the person who wrote it can reliably read it and sometimes not even them
Please no. Cursive fucking sucks. This is not something we should bring back. Let it die for fucks sake.
The main problem I have with it is if your hand writing sucks it’s impossible to read cursive. It just looks like scribble.
Not so much of a problem for good handwriting but most people just suck at it.
Fuck cursive, just let it die old people
