As long time readers know, I have a continuing interest in the state of cursive handwriting. See here, here, here, here, and here for some of my thoughts on the matter. One of the continuing threads in those posts is that cursive is dying a well-deserved death, that many school systems no longer bother teaching it, and that those still hanging on have deemphasized it.
In my state of Florida, for example, some counties have discontinued teaching cursive while others continue teaching it but spend much less time on it than before. Now Florida officials are considering eliminating it statewide. The proximate reason is that the new federal “common core” curriculum omits it. There’s some residual Florida crankiness about the matter and some want to continue teaching cursive if only to show that Florida won’t be pushed around by the Feds.
At least that’s a new reason for refusing to let cursive die. As I discuss in the posts linked above, none of the reasons given for maintaining the teaching of cursive make much sense and are mostly emotional appeals to “the way things were done when I was a kid.” If you want to get a feeling for the tenor of the arguments in favor of cursive, you need look no further than the remarks of state board member John Colon of Manatee County who supports retaining cursive: “Sooner or later people do run out of batteries, you know.” But not, apparently, non sequiturs.