It’s been a long time since I’ve addressed one of my favorite hobby horses: cursive handwriting. I have a long record of writing about it—search for “cursive” on Irreal—and if you’ve been around for a while, you know I think it’s a ridiculous anachronism that should be eliminated forthwith.
One of the silliest arguments in support of cursive is that if we don’t teach it students won’t be able to read important historical documents, such as the Declaration of Independence (to give a parochial example), in the original.
Now the Smithsonian has a program that addresses this concern. Because, in fact, the ability to read cursive is disappearing, the Smithsonian is calling on those who can read it to help digitize historical documents. They already have more than 5,000 volunteers working on the project.
There are several conclusions one can draw from this. The first is that those championing cursive were right and already people can’t read these documents. Of course, that’s facile and ridiculous. The average person can’t read ancient Greek either but that doesn’t stop us from enjoying, say, The Illiad. What’s happening here is that the Smithsonian is crowd sourcing the effort to make these documents available to everyone in easily readable form. I can read cursive and even I had a hard time deciphering some of the sample documents.
The better conclusion, it seems to me, is that efforts are underway to make sure that these documents—even the less important ones—will be available to everyone, not just the experts who will always be able to read them. One could, I suppose, object that this just proves the original objection: people won’t be able to read these documents in the original but as I said most of us can’t read the Illiad in the original either but we can still enjoy and learn from it. And note even that argument has a false premise. Any English speaking person can read the Declaration of Independence in the original, the only difference is that it’s legible instead of in barely decipherable cursive.