Kansas may halt cursive education

[tsb247]

As a Kansas resident, all I can say is that I was taught cursive in grade school. I used it a little, and then I went back to using regular print after that. In highschool, when I started learning drafting, I lettered everything, and I never looked back from there. I think it's a good thing that the education system here is trimming out the more useless things so they can focus on teaching more useful skills.

By the way, engineering lettering is THE single most inefficient way to write things down. However, it looks badass when it's done!

And no, I do not use lettering guides when I am taking notes.

 

[burntcustard]

Another Brit here. Holy shit. So in a significant portion of the modern world, most people don't use cursive handwriting? Anyone using other types of handwriting (unless it's some fancy caligraphy) over here is considered less intelligent. My dad uses engineering lettering most of the time as pictured above, but he has been an engineer pretty much his whole life, inculding when there were only working drawings (and therefore hadwritten text), no CAD, and he has dyslexia so cursive is slightly harder to read.

In my opinion cursive should be taught and regarded highly. If it might be removed to "make room" for other things, then instead MORE education seems like a better alternative to me.

 

[Saladfork]

My handwriting is so terrible that I can't even read it, so I just never do it except to sign things. My signature ends up looking different every time I do it, though.

Nobody I know does it either, which is good because I also can't read most other people's handwriting. It's just too irregular and without a little kerning I find it extremely difficult to differentiate the similar looking letters (l and e, m and n and so on).

Printing, on the other hand, is easy to distinguish and (unless your printing is really bad as well) can be read much faster without having to figure out every second word (for me, anyway).

Besides everything else, I really don't see a reason why you'd need to learn it anyway, apart from reading old historical letters or something.

 

[Rainmaker77]

It's probably a cultural thing, like how I never knew that tipping wasn't an internationally normal thing to do. In the USA if you don't tip your waitstaff 20% of the value of your bill (some say 14% or some hogwash that makes the math iffy) then you're practically punching the waitress in the face on your way out the door.

Whereas in Europe, I'm given to understand that tipping is seen as kinda rude. (Or maybe that was just France, everything seems to upset the French.)

Actually tipping is the norm over here (I always tip anyway), but it's still an extra to be earned through service, you can freely not tip and not be harassed as you leave the restaurant.

 

[Sidmen]

In my opinion cursive should be taught and regarded highly. If it might be removed to "make room" for other things, then instead MORE education seems like a better alternative to me.

The best response to this, that I can see, is the simple question "But why should it be taught and regarded highly?"

Outside of "it looks pretty" and "it's how people did it 60 years ago (or how the English do it)" - both of which don't matter one iota - I can't think of a good reason to bother teaching it. Especially when you continue on with the FACT that it is immediately forgotten (again, outside of England) and people just revert back to printed handwriting.

As for MORE education... Well, you apparently haven't been to an American school. Our schools drag everything out mercilessly, long after I had mastered a skill I was STILL practicing it to cater to the clueless dipshit demographic. Of course, looking back, that could've been partially my fault, since I actively turned down the advanced classes since they were advertised as "more homework" - which was as helpful to me as saying a new car "viciously runs over your testicles".

 

[Glademaster_v1legacy]

I'm not sure I believe these people claiming in the UK everyone writes in cursive. Here in Ireland, what we call "joined up writing" Is only ever used by old people.
They taught it to us in primary school, but nobody continued it into secondary school, and I don't know anyone my age who still uses it.

Myself

I'm not sure I believe these people claiming in the UK everyone writes in cursive. Here in Ireland, what we call "joined up writing" Is only ever used by old people.
They taught it to us in primary school, but nobody continued it into secondary school, and I don't know anyone my age who still uses it.

Plenty of people our age still use joint writing. Most of the people who I know who dropped using joint writing their writing looked like Arabic anyway so it wasn't like anything of value of lost with them going to print.

OT: Just add a touch typing class like an hour a week problem solved and I fucking guarantee it there will be people who still type using 1 finger. I know because we had this in primary school and there was people in my secondary school who I went to primary school with who still did that.

 

[J Tyran]

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.

Actually most people in England either don't or cant use it. This was on the news the other day funnily enough and experts described it as "dead" not even "dying" and only a small minority of people, usually people into calligraphy actually bother with it.

The topic apparently came about because of the photos of David Cameron's pencils, he is left handed and cannot write well in ink because of smudges.

 

[Wayneguard]

What the fuck is cursive...

 

[neverarine]

some of theses people are gonna meet a harsh reality when they hit that university professor who only accepts work written in cursive and who only writes in it, there always is one...

i for one think it should remain being taught, it is important, and to people who arent typographers and english teachers...

 

[JediMB]

Wow.

Just wow.

I'm amazed and appalled by this thread. Are you people serious? You still use printing to write? If you cant write in cursive in Australia by the age of 10, then the teachers start looking at you like there's something wrong with you.

I...
I just...

I cant type any more. I have to leave the computer. This is just so brain exploding.

Well, Kansas isn't in Australia, now is it? Really, no one uses it in America. Ever. School boards all across the country have been dropping it for a while now. I really don't see why the Europeans and Australians in this thread are so shocked that a different country might actually do things differently.

This thread would seriously be a great basis to start a sociology paper on.

I'm European (Swedish), and beyond my signature I haven't used cursive... in the last 15-or-so years, maybe? We may have had a few assignments in high school that required cursive writing, but nothing since then.

EDIT: I'm going to a college/university now, after years of trying to figure out what I want to do with my life, and all assignments are handed in digitally, because it's much easier for everyone involved.

 

[Legion]

I stopped writing in cursive as soon as I started secondary school. I preferred to write without the letters joined up, I don't see what the issue is.

If it was halting handwriting altogether that'd be something completely different.

It's probably a cultural thing, like how I never knew that tipping wasn't an internationally normal thing to do. In the USA if you don't tip your waitstaff 20% of the value of your bill (some say 14% or some hogwash that makes the math iffy) then you're practically punching the waitress in the face on your way out the door.

Whereas in Europe, I'm given to understand that tipping is seen as kinda rude. (Or maybe that was just France, everything seems to upset the French.)

In the UK it largely depends. Some places (normally restaurants if you have eight or more people in the group) tend to automatically add a "service charge" to the bill as standard. If they do that then tipping is not considered necessary. Otherwise 10% of the bill is considered polite, and is generally expected.

That said, waiters and waitresses get paid more than in America due to minimum wage laws we have. So they are still getting what is considered a reasonable wage without a tip.

 

[Sidmen]

some of theses people are gonna meet a harsh reality when they hit that university professor who only accepts work written in cursive and who only writes in it, there always is one...

i for one think it should remain being taught, it is important, and to people who arent typographers and english teachers...

I've left classes because of utterly stupid requirements and demands, at one point raising my hand in a class during orientation (first day) to be excused - I then walked to the guidance councilor and asked to be transferred to a different professor down the hall.

And, could you please illuminate for me: How is it important? Because it's fancy-looking? Because its heritage (English heritage, maybe, but in the United States we have as many German as English-decedents). I honestly have no idea why it could be considered important - its a mode of writing that does a poor job and is being naturally phased out.

 

[AngloDoom]

I used to write in 'cursive' but I found it made my handwriting worse and just looked childish to me, so I now write in print.

I haven't noticed a significant drop in the speed of my writing but I certainly find it a lot easier to read. It also has the added bonus that when a form asks me to write in block capitals all I do to fuck up now is forget to put it in capitals.

 

[lunavixen]

I think a balance would be best, losing something like cursive would be bad, i needed it at uni when taking notes because i couldn't print fast enough to keep up and sometimes missed things (laptops weren't practical as the tables in the lecture halls were too small to sit them on)