Kansas may halt cursive education

[senordesol]

http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/12/omg-cursive-education-on-the-chopping-block/

Cursive may be going the way of the Dodo bird and newspapers: Kansas is mulling a decision to cut cursive education and prioritize typing skills. ?Parents want to know what your school is doing to teach kids to be prepared for the world of technology,? said Bob Voboril, superintendent of schools for the Wichita Catholic Diocese. ?That?s a higher priority for parents than what we would call the penmanship arts.?

On Tuesday, the Kansas State Board of Education will consider what role ? if any ? cursive will have in elementary education and collect survey responses from the districts. The Wichita Eagle reports that cursive lessons have declined in the city, but isn?t sure how seriously board members are taking the decision to completely erase it from the curriculum.

Yeah, yeah make whatever Kansas education jokes you want, but... is this really a bad thing? I can't think of any time in my day-to-day life where I have to use cursive apart from signatures. I kind of feel that cursive is a relic of a bygone era that we can well afford to lose (or at least have it taught later like in a university).

 

[LetalisK]

Good. Cursive is an artifact of the past. On the off chance that there is something that isn't computer text, it's almost always normal print text. I have never been in a situation where cursive was necessary. You don't even need to use it for your signature if you don't want to.

 

[Aris Khandr]

Does anyone really use cursive anymore? It was taught to us in primary school, and for like a year or two it was demanded for major assignments. Then dropped entirely. I can't remember the last time anyone used it for something more lengthy than their signature.

 

[Scarim Coral]

I will laugh at the day when people are so used to computer typing for written work that when in some strange situation, they are force to use cursive writing, their hand writing will be awful!

While I do agree that cursive are being less these days but I do feel they hold some important heritage wise.

 

[370999]

Shame as I do like cursive as a type of handwriting, but yeah, I think schools can better focus that time on other things.

 

[Moderated]

They should teach you to sign your name, make you do it on everything, then teach you nothing else. Signing my name is the only time I have ever used cursive outside of the times I was forced to use it. Typing classes are a good idea.

 

[Tuesday Night Fever]

Good riddance. I can't stand cursive writing. When someone is really good at it, sure, it looks fancy... but the vast majority of people aren't good at it, so it just looks like especially messy scribbles.

I might be slightly biased here, though. For a while I worked in a physical therapy clinic, so I had to deal with a lot of referrals from doctors written in cursive that no one in the office could decipher. We ended up having to spend so much time on the phone confirming the information that the doctor's offices started typing everything. Problem is, they still signed in cursive without their names being in print anywhere, so we still had to call them all the time to find out who actually referred the patients we were getting. Doctor handwriting is generally shitty enough even without cursive thrown into the mix, so it made me kind of bitter.

Frankly, I typing is a much more practical and valuable skill for students to learn at this point in time anyway.

 

[Aris Khandr]

I will laugh at the day when people are so used to computer typing for written work that when in some strange situation, they are force to use cursive writing, their hand writing will be awful!

I cannot fathom a single situation where an adult would be forced to use cursive. Pretty much everything is typed now.

 

[Cavan]

I find it strange that cursive writing is considered some additional unnecessary skill in America :/.

You know what we call cursive writing in England? Writing(yes I know this is quite a douchey thing to say). I genuinely did not know the word 'cursive' until I spoke to Americans many years later. I cannot comment on how younger people who are in the early stages of school now are being taught, but I have a friend who is 17 and for everybody he is around it is considered a basic form of writing that is the norm. So unless the schooling system has so radically changed within the past 5 years as to be unrecognizable to me..

It's perhaps unusual to have 100% joined writing but totally separated writing to me would be the sort of thing you see young children doing. Do so many people genuinely labour at writing in such a way?

The fact that some people consider something to basic so be in need of phasing out..baffles me.

Good. Cursive is an artifact of the past. On the off chance that there is something that isn't computer text, it's almost always normal print text. I have never been in a situation where cursive was necessary. You don't even need to use it for your signature if you don't want to.

Responses like this make me think of those segway machines. I know it's totally unfair but I can't help but think "walking is a relic of a bygone age..what modern human being would need to walk when you can ride?". It's a basic way of making writing more efficient for those times when you may want to write.

On a personal level:I can type at about 100 wpm, but the tactile sensation of writing is nice for me and I find that when I want to scribble notes and reminders and anything like that it is much easier to personalise and accentuate things in such a way that it makes reading it again much more visually distinct and easy to do than if I had typed my thoughts out and printed them out.

Edit: I apologise to the person I misquoted, sorry .

 

[DugMachine]

Good. Cursive is such an outdated and useless way of writing what with computers and just plain print writing is good enough. Even my signature is just my last name with some squiggles and dots for flair.

 

[DudeistBelieve]

Truth, after learning it in the 3rd grade I never used cursive again.

I have no idea why the hell we ever used it in the first place. What was ever wrong with good old print? Does the same exact job and infinitely more readable.

 

[DudeistBelieve]

I find it strange that cursive writing is considered some additional unnecessary skill in America :/.

You know what we call cursive writing in England? Writing. I genuinely did not know the word 'cursive' until I spoke to Americans many years later. I cannot comment on how younger people who are in the early stages of school now are being taught, but I have a friend who is 17 and for everybody he is around it is considered a basic form of writing that is the norm. So unless the schooling system has so radically changed within the past 5 years as to be unrecognizable to me..

It's perhaps unusual to have 100% joined writing but totally separated writing to me would be the sort of thing you see young children doing. Do so many people genuinely labour at writing in such a way?

The fact that some people consider something to basic so be in need of phasing out..baffles me.

Good. Cursive is an artifact of the past. On the off chance that there is something that isn't computer text, it's almost always normal print text. I have never been in a situation where cursive was necessary. You don't even need to use it for your signature if you don't want to.

Responses like this make me think of those segway machines. I know it's totally unfair but I can't help but think "walking is a relic of a bygone age..what modern human being would need to walk when you can ride?". It's a basic way of making writing more efficient for those times when you may want to write.

Edit: I apologise to the person I misquoted.

Occasionally I hand write things before I type them up, how exactly am I being inefficient using print? How much time is really saved using cursive? What, a handful of seconds?

 

[Tuesday Night Fever]

It's perhaps unusual to have 100% joined writing but totally separated writing to me would be the sort of thing you see young children doing. Do so many people genuinely labour at writing in such a way?

Here in the United States, definitely. People who write in cursive for their regular handwriting are a minority.

I don't know about other places in the world, but here, it's just too difficult to read most of the time. It's taught to you early-on, but then most of the time teachers don't require its usage. So most students learn it, then immediately go right back to print writing. The ones who stick with it tend to be the ones I mentioned above in my previous post that are quite good at it and make it look fancy and neat. The ones who don't stick with it seem to rapidly lose the skill, so whenever they try to use it, it comes out illegible.

Unless they're doctors. Then everything they write, regardless of form, is illegible.

 

[Cavan]

Occasionally I had write things before I type them up, how exactly am I being inefficient using print? How much time is really saved using cursive? What, a handful of seconds?

I would say that I have seen people write without joining up anything and they do seem to labour at it. No you're not going to lose a heck of a lot of time in that writing, it is just a basic thing that is taught to make writing more efficient and 90% of the people my age in England are capable of doing it effortlessly.

 

[Jonluw]

So long as they still learn to write by hand, I see this as a good thing.

 

[Lucem712]

I write in a bastardized version of cursive mixed with print, mostly because my pure print looks absolutely childish and there is something very nice about cursive, but maybe it'll become one of those things like calligraphy.

Though, it isn't that big of a deal. Most people (myself included) don't use the cursive they were taught, they make up their own little ways of writing it.

We should still teach how to make a proper signature, though.

 

[Hero in a half shell]

They should teach you to sign your name, make you do it on everything, then teach you nothing else. Signing my name is the only time I have ever used cursive outside of the times I was forced to use it. Typing classes are a good idea.

Signatures don't even have to make sense, they're always illegible anyway, I always sign my name with an obvious spelling mistake, just to see if anyone ever noticed (No one has) and I realised that I'd be able to spot a forged signature because It'd be spelt correctly, although realistically that's never going to happen, but it's nice to know

 

[DevilWithaHalo]

I don't know about other places in the world, but here, it's just too difficult to read most of the time.

This is actually why I don't mind it becoming an optional thing people can learn as opposed to it being mandatory. I've lived all over the world growing up, and poor, illegible hand writing is not exclusive to the US. Cursive writing simply compounds the issue even further, creating an unnecessary strain on people who have to suffer because of another student's short coming. How is a teacher suppose to grade a student on a report if they can't make heads or tails of the words?

Along with cursive, let's make sure the pendulum doesn't swing the other way at the same time. Prohibit and punish 1337 speak. It has no place in an academic setting.

 

[Tuesday Night Fever]

Along with cursive, let's make sure the pendulum doesn't swing the other way at the same time. Prohibit and punish 1337 speak. It has no place in an academic setting.

Ugh. Yes, definitely agreed.

I was in high school 2002-2006. One of the English teachers really loved the idea of peer editing for research papers, so I got to see a lot of the things my classmates wrote. Multiple of them regularly used internet slang, abbreviations, and acronyms in their writing. The worst part is that even if I pointed these out as errors, the teacher wouldn't count them as long as she knew what was meant.

Ridiculous.