I don’t remember people ever writing cursive like what I was taught growing up. People just self-servingly turbo-scribble some chicken-scratch and call it a day. The kid who can’t read our B-movie elvish script isn’t the one with literacy issues.
We either write within the ballpark of standardization, or we don’t. I think kids should be required to put in as much effort into learning cursive, as people put into actually writing cursive. Which is to say, absolutely none at all.
(Sorry to people who actually write legible, clean cursive. I wish I got to read your output in the wild.)
The thing is, it’s easy to read good cursive. It’s just another script. It took me 5 episodes of Last Exile to memorize the Greek equivalents to English letters so I could read all the text without looking up the translation guide. But when their writing looks like Jack Lew’s signature, there’s not a whole lot I can do to decipher it
Yes but really only the artistically minded and those with great manual dexterity have even a slim chance of doing it well. The rest has to write letters hundreds of times while their classmates go to recess.
feels like a lot of older people just use cursive as an excuse to cover up bad handwriting, because it’s harder to tell when it’s all squiggly in the first place
like, there’s a reason we don’t write in fancy serif typefaces, that would result in most people’s writing being even less legible than it already is.
I used to have really legible, accurate cursive. Someone made me feel embarrassed for still using cursive in middle school, so I stopped using it.
Now I can’t remember cursive well enough to use it quickly, and my print looks like an elementary child did it. ALL CAPS print is a good way for me to make my print more legible
turbo-scribble some chicken-scratch and call it a day
But that’s cursive, isn’t it? I always considered cursive the script to be written when you just quickly need to write something down,being the style where the pen is raised the least, which happens to be the fastest way to write, at the cost of legibility. So cursive to me seems like the opposite of fancy.
Well,my teachers at the least insisted that cursive must be written perfectly, or you had to write it again.
As in, “rewrite the assignment because the arch on this lower case n is too high”.I only had that in primary school, because it’s important to have legible handwriting (so the teachers can properly grade you being one of the reasons), and it’s easier to change behaviours early on in life before they become habits, but after that I never had anyone insist on or expect perfect handwriting.
Cursive was taught separately from print. In elementary school an assignment wouldn’t be accepted in print, and afterwards it wouldn’t be accepted in cursive.
The thing is that back in the day you were expected to hand write all of your college assignments and printing or typewriting were not allowed. Because of that, it took decades and decades for enough older educators to die before people could use a computer for homework.
Right. Depending on how old you are, you may have or did have older relatives who wrote in impeccable cursive. My grandmother, for example, who was a high school teacher from the 1940s through to the 70s, wrote cursive that looked almost machine-made because it was so perfect. But they actually taught penmanship as its own subject back when she was a kid in the 1930s.
You’re just not old enough. Cursive was everywhere when I was a kid. They should still teach it to children because children learn language and writing easier than adults do. We should be able to read cursive. It is part of our language, and our history. Every old document is written in cursive. We shouldn’t end up with a society that can’t even read its original Constitution. That’s just Idiocracy.
Do you read old English?
On a regular basis? No. Ever? Of course. Shakespeare is written in old English, the original translation of Homer’s The Odyssey, and the King James Bible, to name a few things.
Shakespeare is modern English with some old words. This is Old English.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43521/beowulf-old-english-version
Thanks for the example and the correction.
The King James Bible is pretty much modern English. Shakespeare too. They actually sort of standardized modern English. Old English, the language,not just English that is old, looks like Icelandic or weird German and is maybe 500 years older than that, give or take.
Edit: Everyone who down voted your comment is dumb. Being willing to learn new things is a mark of high intelligence. Being grateful for the opportunity to learn is the sign of wisdom. Those who downvote you should instead emulate you. If we punish people for being happy to learn, they won’t want to learn.
I didn’t know that. Thanks for the correction.
We are all constantly learning. Thank you for participating in this group discussion.
Look at you two fucking learning and being civil and shit.
Love it. Appreciate you both.
Beowulf is old English. Shakespeare is nothing like old English.
Who the fuck understands old english??
People who need to or want to out of personal interest, just like it should be with cursive.
I remember an English teacher when I was at school talking about how he was teaching Beowulf to A level students and that it was very difficult for him as well not just the students.
Pretty much only scholars. JRR Tolkien did, for example. The Rohirrim in the LOTR trilogy basically speak a form of Mercian Old English, if I recall correctly.
I grew up in a house with a rotary phone and a meticulously maintained phone book (written in cursive.) If I’m too young to have been able to reliable hone my cursive-parsing skills, what can we expect of younger generations?
The Flynn effect suggests people are generally getting smarter, remembering things better, etc. Something is happening to cause younger generations to be generally better than their ancestors. IQ scores have their problems but it’s still a hopeful sign.
Different circles I guess then. Everyone I knew wrote in cursive when I was younger. Regarding your intelligence comment, it’s not an intelligence issue, just an education and exposure issue. Learning cursive is easier than learning to write all-together, but if you’re never taught, and you’re not exposed to it, then you’re probably not going to learn it. It’s such a simple thing to learn that I don’t understand the aversion everyone on this thread has towards it. It’s pretty nice when you have to write a lot of text, like taking notes or journaling.
The aversion in my case comes from seeing time being wasted on that when teachers could use it to teach much more useful things or making sure that kids learned everything else they’ve been taught.
Language changes. Teaching an entire script to be able to read translated documents when there are practical skills that could be taught instead is silly.
We don’t teach old English anymore, even though there’s a huge amount of our cultural history contained in it.
We don’t even teach people about the eras when we used to use “f” in place if “s”, and that’s right in the middle of the constitution.Can you read the original magna carta? America would not be unique amongst English speaking nations in having issues dealing with language drift.
lol mixing up language with its orthography system. Classic error
It’s not that I never learned how to read cursive; it’s that nobody actually writes it legibly.
Facts. Everybody’s “personal flair” on their style of cursive becomes a cryptographic puzzle. I exclusively used cursive until about 7th grade (because it was faster to me), and I still have to decipher most handwritten cursive
Literally the only reason I use any cursive is because it’s useful to distinguish when you’re doing a lot of letter math for physics or calculus.
That and being able to give people thank you cards with immaculate penmanship, still don’t use full cursive for that though, just slow deliberate writing with a bit of italic flair.
Ironically enough I developed my modern handwriting style basically as an act of spite against a professor I was especially cross with in my junior year.
Old bastard comes into class and yells at us about how we’re the worst scoring class he’s ever had and then expects me to not be in the front row visibly anger practicing my letters.
Cursive fonts should at least be consistent.
Conservatives are trying to prevent kids from learning history and sex ed, and we’re still hearing this bullshit lamentation about CURSIVE?
Schools are underfunded, teachers are underpaid and overworked, students are graduating barely able to read and with no critical thinking skills.
Who in their right mind is actually concerned about kids learning cursive?
Things I’d rather schools focus on:
Typing, Personal finance, Current events, Technology literacy, Graphic design, Human Computer Interaction
Or maybe practical skills related to trades or how to fix things: CAD, Cooking, Electrical, Plumbing
Literally ANYTHING but this cursive crap. It’s useless, it’s dead, move on.
To be fair, it’s trivially easy to learn cursive and it’s basically always been an extension of penmanship.
I’ve never been in a situation where penmanship mattered. Typing skills on the other hand are abysmal across the board and hamper my coworkers constantly.
It’s an easy way to teach fine motor control.
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Or disassembling electornics, which ice used way more than fucking cursive.
I’m really confused by all of these not being on the curriculum. I went to secondary school in the 90s in the UK. I had learned joined up writing in early primary school (which was what you used to write essays and coursework) and I had both an electronics class where we soldered circuits and IT class where typing improvement games were available.
It really isn’t. Some people have a talent for it, most don’t.
Y’all don’t use whiteboards?
But why do children need to be required to learn it when there are more pressing skills that they need?
Why is penmanship anything that we care about now? Who writes things outside of notes?
How are you supposed to do any of this when your brain hemispheres aren’t connected? If you don’t link your letters, you ain’t wire your brain cells. /s
I once saw a post on Facebook claiming this unironically. I learned cursive (or a simplified version I think) in school and thought it’s still the standard until I saw the Facebook post and was like “so what”. How can people get so emotional about such details? Teach your kid cursive at home when it’s so important for you! Oh, you don’t have kids but a strong opinion about education? Share it on Facebook! I’m not there anymore and for a while now.
Absolutely they need to teach finance. I remember when I had to get a mortgage for my house and it was a complete slog because I had absolutely no idea how the whole process was supposed to work. The thing is its actually not that complicated, but because I didn’t know what I was doing it took forever and was stressful.
Schools teach academics. Parents teach life skills. Teachers already have enough to handle, I don’t understand this recent push to make teachers teach shit that parents should be explaining.
I somewhat agree that you can’t expect teachers to teach kids everything. A professor explained to me once that school should teach you how to learn and a degree is a demonstration of your ability to learn.
The issue I have with what you’re saying is that we know that not everyone wins the birth lottery and has two parents with the time to raise their kids properly.
Public school should be an equalizer and it shouldn’t matter what kind of family you were born into. And yes, that probably means smaller class sizes, more teachers, more specialization of teachers, or just plain giving the teachers the resources they would need to teach some of these critical things. I know teachers and know that they are underpaid and overworked, we can’t ask more of them without addressing that first.
I’m just very concerned about the long term impact to our civilization of leaving too much teaching up to parents who themselves are uneducated. There are no qualifications needed to become a parent, unlike being a teacher. Some parents that I talk to, you can’t get more than four sentences into a conversation with them before they start spouting off conspiracy theories or justifying racism and if schools aren’t allowed to teach these kids anything to the contrary then I fear for the future.
I’m also concerned about the perverse incentive that corporations have in a capitalist economy to ensure that kids aren’t properly educated. Kids who aren’t taught anything about finance are more likely to be preyed on by credit card companies, student loan sharks, etc. Corporations are constantly working to deceive us on all matter of topics and kids need to have at least a baseline of understanding of some of these things or they will get screwed over really easily.
Im kind of with you. It’s going to come off as arrogant, but in HS and college I feel like learned how to learn new things. I was never taught how to get a mortgage by my parents…nor any financial stuff for that matter. I learned it all myself. I read up on investing, when I went to get a
