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no more cursive: YES👆
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Had I heard him correctly? Who
else can’t read cursive? I asked the class. The answer: about
two-thirds. And who can’t write it? Even more. What did they do about
signatures? They had invented them by combining vestiges of whatever
cursive instruction they may have had with creative squiggles and
flourishes. Amused by my astonishment, the students offered reflections
about the place—or absence—of handwriting in their lives. Instead of the
Civil War past, we found ourselves exploring a different set of
historical changes. In my ignorance, I became their pupil as well as a
kind of historical artifact, a Rip van Winkle confronting a transformed
world.
In 2010, cursive was omitted from the new national Common
Core standards for K–12 education. The students in my class, and their
peers, were then somewhere in elementary school. Handwriting instruction
had already been declining as laptops and tablets and lessons in
“keyboarding” assumed an ever more prominent place in the classroom.
Most of my students remembered getting no more than a year or so of
somewhat desultory cursive training, which was often pushed aside by a
growing emphasis on “teaching to the test.” Now in college, they
represent the vanguard of a cursiveless world.
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