What was the point of learning cursive in school?

[skinsguy]

You have to remember, a lot of historical documents were written in cursive, so it's still important to at least teach kids how to read in cursive. They may find reading these documents would be like trying to read something in a foreign language.

It has also been proven that children with learning disabilities or certain intellectual disabilities, such as Down Syndrome, have benefited greatly from learning to write in cursive. The cursive writing seems to help develop fine motor skills, and has helped those children to understand better how words are formed (since cursive letters are written together) than writing individual letters.

Even though I am in Computer Information systems, I would never want to be a slave to the technology - and I think we are starting to teach ourselves and our children to be just that. That is why I don't buy the excuse that we're doing more and more "writing" on computers which makes cursive obsolete. What about writing signatures? While, yes, we don't always use perfect cursive to write our signatures, cursive does help to establish our identities when it comes to our signatures. It's a heck of a lot easier to copy someone's signature that is written mostly in print than it is a cursive signature. Even though we might be moving into the point of replacing hand written signatures with passwords and thumb prints, you still have to fall back to the good ol' fashion hand-written stuff if your computer system goes down.

So, I'd say even though cursive may not be as important to learn as say math or science, it still serves a very useful purpose in our society.

[Schneed10]

Originally Posted by skinsguy

You have to remember, a lot of historical documents were written in cursive, so it's still important to at least teach kids how to read in cursive. They may find reading these documents would be like trying to read something in a foreign language.

It has also been proven that children with learning disabilities or certain intellectual disabilities, such as Down Syndrome, have benefited greatly from learning to write in cursive. The cursive writing seems to help develop fine motor skills, and has helped those children to understand better how words are formed (since cursive letters are written together) than writing individual letters.

Even though I am in Computer Information systems, I would never want to be a slave to the technology - and I think we are starting to teach ourselves and our children to be just that. That is why I don't buy the excuse that we're doing more and more "writing" on computers which makes cursive obsolete. What about writing signatures? While, yes, we don't always use perfect cursive to write our signatures, cursive does help to establish our identities when it comes to our signatures. It's a heck of a lot easier to copy someone's signature that is written mostly in print than it is a cursive signature. Even though we might be moving into the point of replacing hand written signatures with passwords and thumb prints, you still have to fall back to the good ol' fashion hand-written stuff if your computer system goes down.

So, I'd say even though cursive may not be as important to learn as say math or science, it still serves a very useful purpose in our society.

And I guess we can't transpose historical documents into text to be stored on CPUs? And I guess we can't find other ways to develop the fine motor skills of certain kids?

Cursive's usefulness diminishes with every passing day. Our society makes progress so we don't have to continue doing things that are a complete waste of time.

[skinsguy]

Originally Posted by Schneed10

And I guess we can't transpose historical documents into text to be stored on CPUs? And I guess we can't find other ways to develop the fine motor skills of certain kids?

Cursive's usefulness diminishes with every passing day. Our society makes progress so we don't have to continue doing things that are a complete waste of time.

Sure, you could transpose those documents, but being someone who enjoys history, I absolutely hate the idea of everything being stored on some CPU. I personally like the idea of being able to read every word of the authentic document. To me, it's empowering.

And, in this day and age where our country should think in terms of fiscal responsibility, why should we spend millions of dollars on alternate therapies for motor skills when we already have a cost free solution? My point is, to say cursive is a complete waste of time is sorely an incorrect statement to make.

[Schneed10]

Originally Posted by skinsguy

Sure, you could transpose those documents, but being someone who enjoys history, I absolutely hate the idea of everything being stored on some CPU. I personally like the idea of being able to read every word of the authentic document. To me, it's empowering.

And, in this day and age where our country should think in terms of fiscal responsibility, why should we spend millions of dollars on alternate therapies for motor skills when we already have a cost free solution? My point is, to say cursive is a complete waste of time is sorely an incorrect statement to make.

OK, dinosaur.

[SolidSnake84]

Ok just the other day i was having a conversation sort of like this with my grandma. She turns 75 this year, is in fairly good health for an old person, and she is still independant and able to drive safely and get herself around.

My mom for the longest time has been trying to get her to go paperless on some of her bills because one of the bedrooms in her house is becoming worse than a library with all these returned checks and all that stuff. The point i'm trying to make is there are going to be a lot of people from "back in that day" who still do things the antiquated and archaic way.

My grandma could save herself a lot of time and effort by letting my Mom sign her up for paperless billing on things, and set her up to pay her utilities online (phone, cable, etc...) But my grandma insists on doing it the old-fashioned way, even though some of the places she goes to don't accept checks anymore, my granny doesn't own a credit card, and she is obviously leery about carrying large amounts of cash when she goes to town.

Cursive makes me think of all those things. It was something that worked great once upon a time when people dipped their quills into inkwells and wrote on parchment that was lit up by kersoene lamplight.

There truly is not much use for it today. I'm not busting on the old folks in this post, but honestly the only people i know that still use cursive is the 60+ crowd, and even at my company we all use print on the few documents we have to hand write on.

[skinsguy]

Originally Posted by Schneed10

OK, dinosaur.

Whatever man. All I'm saying is, being so dismissive over a learning tool like that tells me one hasn't looked at all evidence of the importance of cursive. Yes, we as adults in this day and age of doing just about everything on computer no longer see the importance of such a learning tool as cursive. That is because we have developed a disconnect with children's learning. And, in my humble opinion, I would much rather use funds to research a better use of technology in areas such as finding cures for deadly diseases, rather than to find a more expensive, alternate way of developing motor skills when there are existing, inexpensive ways of accomplishing the same task.