Shades of Mediocrity

The writing on the wall ... for handwriting?

Is cursive handwriting going the way of the dinosaurs? According to some educators, teaching students to write in cursive is no longer worth the time it takes. As handwriting continues to lose ground as a method of written communication, the advantages of learning cursive are fewer and fewer.

I have fond memories of learning cursive. I vividly remember my third grade teacher, tiny, white-haired Mrs. Achterberg, teaching us cursive by the old-fashioned but pretty Palmer Method. I was always a good student of penmanship, and even went through a period of obsession with learning calligraphy in late elementary school and junior high. I took pride in my ability to write beautifully (probably because my talents in the visual arts are otherwise close to nonexistent). Although my "regular" handwriting has evolved into a fusion of cursive and printing, to this day, I can still write perfect Palmer Method if I try.

But it's easy for me to concede that cursive probably isn't a necessary skill for students to learn now, especially since it doesn't come easily to most kids -- which makes learning it both frustrating and time-consuming. Considering the ways in which the elementary curriculum has expanded, something has to go, and cursive seems like a reasonable thing to dump. If kids are going to spend a lot of time practicing something that requires fine motor skills, I'd prefer to see them take up a musical instrument, or learn proper techniques for drawing, painting, or sculpting. And for the purposes of communication, typing by touch is clearly a much more essential thing to learn.

The only problem is that most people who can't write cursive also can't read cursive. That means all sorts of original documents from the last couple of centuries will be illegible to a large number of people. Reading cursive will probably someday be a skill possessed only by historians of the 19th and 20th centuries. But as the example of North by Northwest in the article demonstrates, this is also another example of the slow erosion of cultural continuity, another lost bit of common understanding that helps us relate to the past. Just think of all the classic films in which a note or a letter written in cursive is displayed on the screen. These will become indecipherable, just like the countless idioms, expressions, and bits of slang that have fallen out of usage over the decades. The end of cursive as something universally known by those with a basic education means it will be just a little bit harder to understand the great cultural products of the past. It's a normal process, but it's a little bit sad to see it happening.