What if they do?
George Couros's List: Cursive Writing
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Oct 19, 10
Vocabulary is lessened through the increased use of cursive writing in the classroom.
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The more education a child had been allowed to have before his/her handwriting was changed over to cursive -- in other words, the fewer months and years s/he had spent learning/using cursive -- the larger his or her vocabulary was (as measured by the number of different words used in the student's writing over the course of a year). The differences were huge -- the kids who'd been required to do the least cursive had vocabularies THREE TIMES the size of those who'd been required to do the most cursive.
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From this, for some reason, the researchers decided that the second half of 3rd grade was a great time to change everyone's writing to cursive (which, as the researchers pointed out, basically means putting all other aspects of written English on hold in order to go back to scratch and start all over again with the ABC.) An even more logical next step, though, would be to wonder why any age-group at all should be required to spend time on what amounted to an exercise in vocabulary-stunting (not that cursive in itself is bad for your vocabulary but you're unlikely to increase your vocabulary while that and other things have been put on hold for the sake of changing your handwriting style. The fact that the vocabulary-stunting effect was worst for those who'd been changed to cursive the earliest can -- as the researchers noted -- be at least partly explaned by the fact that any educational damage has worse effects when imposed on younger, more impressionable, more ignorant students.
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Add Sticky Notewhen taking notes in class (not everybody has a laptop!)
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Add Sticky NoteYou might argue that printing works just as well during exams and for taking notes in class… if you can print what is the purpose of cursive? The answer is that when time is limited, cursive writing is quicker and more fluid because the pen doesn’t leave the page as much as with printing, and there are fewer stops and starts. This means that you can write more during an exam, or take down more of what the teacher said during class.
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So if writing faster is the purpose of cursive, then it should not be as important if you have a computer in front of you?
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With the advent of typewriters and computers, cursive as a way of formalizing correspondence has fallen out of favor. Most tasks which would have once required a "fair hand" are now done using word processing and a printer. There exists a backlash against this with some advocating the use of personal notes written in longhand, to provide the sense that a real person is involved in the correspondence, (e.g.) thank you notes. The teaching of cursive has been de-emphasized in many public schools, but is still used for situations such as timed tests with large writing portions, where it is considered faster. Also being able to write in a fair-hand is still looked as a sign of literacy in many countries.
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