It’s been a while since I’ve ventured into the emotional minefield that is cursive handwriting. Here’s a couple of tweets from Paul Graham that make two very good points:
They should start by at least not making kids learn the weird copperplate script they call “cursive.” I learned it in school but don’t write in it myself.
— Paul Graham (@paulg) December 6, 2021
The first is a meta remark about handwriting in general. As Graham says, there are very few places where it’s absolutely required. One of those is taking exams and if your (cursive) handwriting, like mine, is execrable, you can even lose points for illegibility.
The second is that things would be better if we got rid of cursive. Graham’s characterization of it as “the weird copperplate script they call ‘cursive’” makes a point that is often missed: cursive really is an atavistic throwback to an earlier time that has no more relevance today than, say, the Gutenberg Press. It’s interesting and important in an historical sense but simply has no place in our day-to-day lives.
Its uselessness in modern life is made clear when you consider the arguments advanced for the continued teaching of it. Its advocates say things like, “If we don’t teach cursive, students won’t be able to read the Declaration of Independence or The Constitution in the original.” That no one insists we should be teaching ancient Greek so that students can read the Iliad or the Odyssey “in the original” shows how silly that argument is. The other arguments for cursive are likewise special pleading.
It’s well past time that we laid this anachronism to rest. Even if you force students to learn it, they, like Graham and I, will abandon it as soon as they can. It’s really just a waste of class time that many students find painful and almost all find pointless.