Said New Jersey governor Phil Murphy, quoted in "Cursive Makes a Comeback in New Jersey Schools/In one of his final acts in office, Gov. Philip D. Murphy signed a bill on Monday requiring third, fourth and fifth graders to learn cursive" (NYT).
Proponents of cursive cite studies that link handwriting to better information retention and writing speed, and say — as Mr. Murphy did in a statement released as he signed the bill — that knowing script can help people read the original U.S. Constitution....
On Tuesday, Gabrielle and Kurt McCann, of Lebanon, N.J., were waiting to break the news to their 9-year-old son, Atlas McCann, when he got home from school. “I think it is important that kids are able to use that refined motor skill,” Ms. McCann said in an interview shortly after a meeting where she said she had taken all her notes in longhand.
But Atlas, she said, was thinking, “What’s the point of having to sit here and torture myself?”
The poor boy has the weight of the world on his shoulders. And now, this additional burden — handwriting! What for? Who reads the Constitution in the original handwriting? It's not even cut-and-paste-able. It's not searchable in handwritten form. Atlas will grope forward, if the time ever comes, asking AI what constitutional clause goes with whatever is the issue of the day. What constitutional clause deals with transgender women in girls sports? What constitutional clause gives cis gender girls the right to undress at public school in a single-sex locker room? The ancient handwriting will not say. AI will.
Let's consult not a politician but an expert:
“Oh, God,” Morgan Polikoff, an education professor at the University of Southern California, said when he learned of the New Jersey law.... He attributed the renewed affection for the style’s curlicues and squiggles to “boomerish nostalgia,” and said he was struck by cursive’s bipartisan appeal, with states as different politically as Arkansas and California requiring its instruction. Conservatives, the professor said, promote its utility for reading old documents; liberals like it for its beauty as an art form....
Fight the decline lest the day come when we cannot read the documents. Then what?
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66 comments:
Coming up next: Driver's Ed, with hand signals and >gasp< stickshifts.
Calling Rachel Jeantel to the witness stand…
"My teachers could have easily ridden with Jesse James for all the time they stole from me."
Richard Brautigan
What do Millenial and Gen Z signatures look like? We all have signatures on our drivers licenses and passports, right? We sign checks (for those of us who still use checks). We sign mail-in ballots that are supposedly checked against the signature on our voter registration.
There's still value learning cursive, IMHO. It improves mind-muscle connections, works on fine motor skills.
How else could we read the Handwriting on the Wall?
Visual IQ and manual dexterity.
"Let's consult not a politician but an expert..."
You mean one of those same experts who dumped phonics from the national curriculum, and made the United States public education system simultaneous the most expensive and least effective in the developed world, one of those experts?
My penmanship was always awful, primarily because I moved from Texas to Missouri before third grade, which was when the kids in my school district in Texas started learning cursive, but the kids in my Missouri school district had already learned cursive in second grade. I was already behind and never really caught up. In the end, I only use it for my signature. Otherwise, I print.
"We sign mail-in ballots that are supposedly checked against the signature on our voter registration."
Ok- I don't care what anyone says, that right there is funny.
My second grade grand daughter writes in beautiful script. She attends a Catholic school in south Florida.
A good guideline for any school board or principal: Assiduously root out every educational fad that has burrowed into your schools since the Department of Education was founded in 1979. Going forward, do not spend a penny on educational "consultants" or allow any ideas from the ed schools into your system. They are intellectual vandals, mountebanks, and communist termites. They have nothing but poison and failure to offer to any school in America.
I look forward to the time when we can abolish Education as a major altogether, close the ed schools, and force all teachers to have a degree in a real academic subject.
I'm sure that in the end, when it comes to cursive, Atlas will just shrug.
And boy, could Shatner chew up the scenery! Great scene, though.
How else do you write? I learned cursive when I was seven. Little Atlas is already two years behind.
I'm a boomer and my handwriting sucks. The French know how to teach cursive, but their handwriting looks like the script in a Barbar book.
And yet Richard Brautigan ended up with an education that allowed him to become a famous writer...
It's really too bad that if you made them write out their tests in cursive, for example, that they would be foreclosed the latest methods, such as having AI write their answers for them.
I could care less about them being able to read founding documents, though that's nice. The main thing that I'm worried about, which only just recently occurred to me, is that they won't have a legal signature. Waaaaay more impactful.
Eighth graders in California in the 50s were required to pass a Constitution test to pass on. Good idea. But cursive? Who uses it. More invasive, useless Democrat stuff.
Perhaps the Constitution is a poor example, but a gargantuan mass of history is contained in documents written in cursive -- letters, diaries, ledgers, reports, treaties, deeds, wills, and a thousand kinds of court documents. How will historians do their thing if they can't read the source material. Is that like asking a budding archeologist of the Bronze Age Near East to ignore learning cuneiform?
"Well," replies the expert, "we'll just teach history majors to read and write cursive. The rest don't need it."
And how will the rest of us check their work, if we can't read the sources for ourselves? It seems to me that what the experts are planning isn't a profession of history, but a priesthood with exclusive access to the holy writ. Keep in mind that there was a time when a layman seeking to read the Bible was a heresy punishable by death.
“It is a slow craft in a fast world”
Do they wait for their child to break the news to him about other curriculum changes?
"I look forward to the time when we can abolish Education as a major altogether, close the ed schools, and force all teachers to have a degree in a real academic subject."
Hear, hear! The creation of the Ed. major is a correctable tragedy.
off
With that given name, the boy will have more significant problems than cursive.
off
Reversion to thr pre gutenberg era
There are a lot of other things we teach young students that are less useful or even harmful. I think the young minds have room and time for this. It's not exactly hard, and you actually teach yourself. I never got very good at cursive writing, but reading it has been valuable.
So right now, is it a kind of Boomer code that the young can't understand, like a stick shift, or anything without buttons?
You can teach yourself cursive in a day.
Does anybody else recognize Mulvihill, from Chinatown (Roy Jensen)?
I have a very part-time job in an office and I work with a young gal in her 20s who couldn't read my hand written notes. And I've been complimented many times on my penmanship. She is finally learning to read it. SMH
Writing in cursive is a skill that should be taught to elementary students just like PE needs to be taught and art and music and drama and dance. Tying physical motor skills to the intellect is the key to cultivate and develop common Sense.
Implication?
liberals don't care about America or "old documents". Something they show in 1000 different ways.
Does Blue Murphy in Blue NJ think Das Kapital and Mein Kampf are written in cursive?
When our sone was in college he had an absentee ballot rejected because his signature didn’t match. Now he just uses a scribble…..
While in middle school, a granddaughter and some of her friends would write notes to one another in class, using cursive, so that most if not all of the other kids couldn't read them.
Girls' cursive is 45% better than boys'. I propose a $3 billion national initiative to close this alarming gap.
Also, I can see the utility of being able to write without a device - cursive or not.
Because they no longer teach cursive in primary School, handwritten prescriptions are now readable by the general public.
2-eye: "The French know how to teach cursive, but their handwriting looks like the script in a Barbar book."
Yes, I am fascinated by national cursive styles. Trump's signature looks very German. Odd, because he learned cursive in US schools. Maybe he made a deliberate effort to write like his father, or more likely, grandmother? CC, JSM
Its like navaho code talkers
In blue states and red states, the state gov't whether from the perch of the governor or from the state leg makes a cottage industry out of ordering school boards/districts to do thus-and-so. These mandates accumulate over the years and decades and they are one reason for steadily increasing administrative costs in public school districts. Each program costs a bit (and sometimes more than a bit) to provide, fund, administer, and keep track of.
Going to a Catholic school, we learned cursive or else. The nuns wanted perfect handwriting. We were graded. My sister in law, a former teacher, says no one needs to learn cursive because we use computers now, no need to learn to write at all. I think its because most teachers are lazy and dont want to learn it either.
What has he been for eight years
Cursive requires discipline something the schools dont unatill
There is some evidence that taking notes in cursive leads to better learning. It engages the brain differently.
Everyone has seen the typist who has no conscious memory of what they wrote, i.e., typed, from dictation. The same has been seen with students who basically transcribe the improv lecture given in class.
Real study requires interacting with the material. Transmissionism is the idea that a student can be spoken at and somehow then know.
Andy Matuschak [Econtalk podcast]: Yeah. Especially months later. Lectures are maybe an easier thing to attack. I think we kind of have an intuition that, 'Oh, you attend a lecture,' and you might say something like, 'Oh, that was interesting.' Or 'that was helpful.' And then: Did it actually help you understand the material? Well, maybe, if after the lecture you did a whole bunch of stuff: You did some problems that suited some projects. But, if you just listen to the lecture, you probably don't walk away with all that much, except perhaps excitement, emotion, things like that. And that's because lectures, like books--as I was describing before--are sort of founded on this transmissionism notion: the notion is that 'I as the teacher can get up there and say a bunch of words; then you'll know stuff.'
My wife teaches in a majority-minority Middle school. The number of kids that can read cursive is nearly zero.
The teachers have been known to use notes written in cursive for communications ... and they can be hand-delivered by students!
NJ is only 3 or 4 good decisions away from having a chance to catch up to Mississippi's elementary education.
“What has he been for eight years
Cursive requires discipline something the schools dont unatill”
Typing, however, requires its own set of skills.
Assuming little Atlas gets into college, how does he propose to take a blue book essay exam. By writing in block
Good luck with that. Many profs don't like laptops. I am asking our hostess how many students in her con law could could not write.
The thought never entered my head until now that someone who can read and write the English language could not read cursive writing. When I was a kid, no one called it cursive; it was just handwriting or formal writing.
When I was matriculating my way down the field in law school, I was confronted with certain professors who, for the final (and only) exam, made you responsible for every word uttered by them during class. I quickly developed a hybrid of printing and cursive where my pen never left the page but I made letters in the quickest manner possible, closer to printing than cursive. That, combined with abbreviating as much as possible, made the task possible. Surprisingly, my study partners (I disliked a study group, preferring only one classmate in each class for the semester-long preparation for the final exam) could read my notes if they missed a class.
Is our children learing?
Not much
Woke leftist Marxism, gender and sex obsessions…taught by childless sex obsessed leftwing perverts , on the school menu.
Cursive was an interesting adaptation that is now useless. There is no evidence that it improves any cognitive or even motor skill. It's one of those things where people just feel like it should do something good so they advocate for it.
The not a politician but an expert is "expert" in the politics of education (i.e. policy). Knowing USC well enough my hunch is the "expert" is less informed on how children's brains process and learn language than the average working teacher. The physical act of fluidly writing is tightly integrated into the process of training our brains to operate and process language. Early Childhood Education was the only coursework that interested me in the credentialling program.
The professor from USC is ignorant or dangerous, maybe both.
People need to be able to read and write cursive for one big reason: legal documents. People have to be able to read and write signatures written in cursive. (Plus, you never know when some older person might throw a contract at you to sign that's handwritten in cursive.)
In an electronics device class in the 80s, we spent 6 weeks on troubleshooting and repair of microprocessors. There were clock signals, address/data buses, interrupts, pinouts, logic probes, timing diagrams, soldering, etc.
Years later through an employer program, each eligible tech took a Digital 2 semester and it was covered in about an hour in the classroom because today you simply snap out and snap in a new board.
Likewise, my 9 year old grandson can download an app and snap a photo of a foreign language for translation or record the voice of a Spanish speaking delivery person, just as he can to translate cursive or hell, even write it for print.
Seems like it’s always the red team bitching about inefficiencies in public schools.
My cursive sucks because it transformed into my personal shorthand in kollidj. On the bright side: no one can read my notes.
Without cursive, twenty-first century Americans won't get Bartelby, the Scrivener.
Aggie said...
"Coming up next: Driver's Ed, with hand signals and >gasp< stickshifts."
I took my truck to a local oil change place a few years ago. (I had to because the warranty on the engine rebuild required a receipt of the first oil change four weeks after the rebuild.) I ended up having to drive my truck in and then out of the service bay because none of the young people working there knew how to drive a stick shift.
Never mind the Constitution. Even the people who read it don’t understand it, hence all the 5-4 decisions and back-and-forth on segregation, abortion, etc. on the SC. Bring back Latin and Greek! That will make the little buggers really suffer, plus they’ll be able to understand the founding documents of Western civilization, at least some of which made sense.
If the educational establishment and schools of education had not squandered their credibility on their unswerving loyalty to failed methodologies for teaching reading over that last five decades, I would be more willing to trust them to evaluate the usefulness of cursive. The "educationalists" have proven themselves to be nothing but political hacks. Why should they be surprised that politicians are moving in on their territory?
As an Educational Technician in K-5, I have seen students so proud to show me cursive. It allows fir greater fluidity in later years to take notes, quickly too from their professor's lessons. Also, .shoukd the children receive handwritten cursive cards from their elder relatives, to be able to decipher what is written in the cards. I do also belive that there is some proven correlation to writing and learning, not just typing. It seems organic in nature, writing and learning, retaining. I love to print and have a legible and fine printing ability, but for jotting notes and getting words on the page during a class or lecture, handwriting in cursive sure kept it in real time for me.
Most of the things we learn are not necessary, but there are few, if any, that I wish I never learned. Especially the easy ones.
One thing I wish I'd learned more of was how to tie knots. It seems like one of those things that's much harder to learn when you get older, like another language.
My late parents had beautiful cursive handwriting. In Cuba they were taught the Palmer method. I, on the other hand being a dummy, never mastered it. As noted above it is useful for various reasons including legal signature ( DocuSign has dumbed us down even further) and if the Big One happens, when all electronics are useless, it will be in great demand.
I agree with Quaestor's point late in his comment that, as with any translation, you put yourself at the mercy of the translator if you are unable to read the original document. Relying on people who are motivated to learn a skill brings with it the reason why they want to be the ones doing the work. That's less of a problem with language translation because of the number of speakers, at least of major languages, ensures most viewpoints are covered so if there are major errors somebody will object.
As far as it being useless, plenty of instruction in school is useless in specific application once you reach adulthood.
I bet cursive is much harder to learn when you get older. Get it done now.
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