New Jersey Lawmakers Push For Cursive Writing Instruction in Elementary School

When I was a kid in the 1970's it was called SCRIPT vs print. I agree that kids need to know how to write in script/cursive.

Someone told me recently that the youngster don't know how to write that way anymore- those say under 20.

What a waste of time learning cursive writing in 2025.

“Can we having typing class and a smoking lounge?”

Focus on literacy and speaking English first.

And grammar, oh dear.

The ability to read and write cursive enhances learning and the retention of information while writing. For children, the task of forming and recognizing letters/words requires different areas of the brain, employing small muscle coordination along with the cognitive work of word recognition. Just tapping keys does not yield the same results.

Just go to chatgptfree and enter this prompt "provide articles and research on the effects of cursive writing on brain development of young children". You will find a spate of sources that will inform you.

Start with mandatory retraining for all medical doctors. Disgraceful chicken scratch. It's like they don't want anybody to read what they're writing. ✍️

They should also teach them to send telegraphs and use a fax machine...

Next: classes shorthand, along with typing. All Executive-Suite aspiring "career gals" will be signing up.

New Jersey is #1 in the nation in education. I think they might know what they're talking about.

Or we could just raise morons like Alabama or Oklahoma.

I don’t buy that cursive engages the brain for learning more than print. Typing, yes. Print, no.

R2 Not if people start using it again.

Writing in cursive (we also called it "script") is neater, and faster. Whoever thought it was a good idea to stop it and print every... single... letter... separately?

People's handwriting who never learned cursive is smoetimes so terrible. Handwriting doesn't need to be individualistic. It needs to be readable.

Kids can't read all kinds of old documents if they don't learn cursive. They can't read old letters written by their own parents and grandparents.

Some ideas don't work, sometimes you have to return to somethingt more sensible.

*sometimes

R11 also believes vaccines cause autism.

Some Montessori schools teach cursive. There are good arguments for it, but I think it’s pretty far down the list of what schools should be concentrating on. It’s a “nice to have.”

R6 clap.

Cursive is a relic, it's irrelevant now.

R12 - NOBODY writes now. They type.

How old and out of touch are the posters in this thread?

When I was a kid it was Penmanship. A chart with the Palmer Method was above the blackboard in every class room.

A woman on television taught her 18-year-old grandson how to sign his name, knowing it will be needed on legal documents.

When was that R19?

It’s very good for hand eye coordination and for small motor training and development. It’s not JUST about a seemingly-arcane practice.

Cursive is irrelevant. Even elementary school kids use their school-issued tablets/laptops in the classroom. Everything is typed now.

Have you tried reading documents from 100 or 200 years ago? Even knowing the Palmer Method cursive, it’s very, very difficult.

r19 same here. To this day my signature is very Palmer method. I'll be 45 in a month.

It’s hard to fit everything in. (I’m the father of an NJ public school 1st grader.)

The test score obsessees want drill down work, as advanced as possible, on math and reading/writing/spelling.

The “it’s the 21st century now, people” types of parents push for tech/computer literacy and Mandarin Chinese (no joke, they teach it, and my daughter can now count to 100 and say all kinds of things)

The believers in the humanities want art and music to not be sacrificed on the altar of budget limitations and time limitations.

And very young children need recess and a little downtime as well.

And so on. If there’s room to teach cursive, fine, but all of these things are a zero-sum game in terms of the finite classroom hours a week. And everybody has opinions, and that’s an understatement.

Yes, in an era in which we can't even begin to teach children to discern facts from propaganda, let's instead teach them to write in a manner not used for over 25 years. While we're at it, let's reintroduce the abacus, slide rule and film strips, too!

Somehow, I feel that the relative wealth of New Jerseyans is a bit more determinative of the state's educational ranking than whether or not they teach cursive.

Check this link for more in-depth coverage of the issue:

My sugar daddy signs all of my checks.

How many of the boomers in here arguing for bringing back cursive can rotate a .pdf and write code? Teaching critical thinking and how to properly analyze information for accuracy would be much better suited for the youth.

Rotating a PDF is very easy but writing code?! Not analogous at all.

Fuck you r30. I presume that your handwriting is so terrible and your instruction in cursive was so bad that you think nobody needs it in this day and age. You have leapt to the wrong conclusion, bucko.

It's not really true that nobody has to hand write anything any more. Where I work there are all kinds of notes that have to be written by hand. There's a white board where people have to write things.

People are going to have to pick up a writing implement and write something sometime in their lives. You have to write a sympathy card. You have to write a note in a birthday card, or in a visitor book. Are people being deliberately stupid about this?

I'd be embarrassed to be an adult whose handwriting looks like that of an eleven year old.

What is the problem with teaching basic handwriting skills?

R32 What’s a sympathy card?

I'll tell you what's hard to read – – Russian cursive!

Wouldn't it be strange if the only people who could read a simple note by Harry Truman were handwriting experts, while the rest of the populace would not be able to decipher it?

Old people shouldn't talk about things they no longer understand.

R31 I’m actually in my 30s and had prizes for my penmanship in 4th and 5th grade. However, by high school everything was required to be Times New Roman and 12 size font double spaced in MLA. University and grad school required APA style.

I never once had to write in cursive since 6th grade.

I'm in my 60s. I'm not sure anyone ever HAD to write in cursive, after we learned it in elementary school. If you took a test or a quiz, you didn't have to write in cursive. But you have to use handwriting. Didn't you ever take a handwritten quiz or test?

In college we had to type papers but we still needed to write on paper sometimes. Or take notes.

The point here is (to me, anyway) is being able to read cursive, and to use ti when you want to or need to. I don't want to have to print a note to someone when it's easier for me to write in cursive, because they aren't going to understand it. Or to try to figure out how old they are and whether they learned cursive or not.

Children need to be taught how to press a button and not to question why. It'll prepare them for working in the real world.

Oh well, who cares? We'll replace them soon enough with AI so there's no need to even educate them now. It just means we have to pay more in taxes, and we can't have that.

What about signatures on legal documents? Can they be printed or must they be in cursive? Is one method better to use to prevent fraud?

[quote] Some Montessori schools teach cursive.

Those schools are usually not real Montessori.

Stop making kids dumb. They should be learning cursive and how to tell time. Yes, you can press buttons or look at a digital clock but it’s making them mentally lazy.

[quote] Cursive is irrelevant. Even elementary school kids use their school-issued tablets/laptops in the classroom. Everything is typed now.

You’re the reason we have so many stupid children.

A whole generation without cursive schools= no one knowing how to sign their own name.

[quote] "We are giving them a valuable skill they will use throughout their lives," said McKnight.

I was tormented by teachers for my poor penmanship. I guess those bitches didn't know that handwriting would be obsolete in our lifetimes.

Do you honestly think that people can't sign their own names R44? Ridiculous.

[quote] Do you honestly think that people can't sign their own names

I sign vif X.

In the 50s & 60s when I was in grammar school we were taught cursive in the 3rd grade. It is simply unfathomable to me that any school system in this country would stop teaching it. How the hell are people who were never taught cursive getting decent jobs in the workplace today? Or getting accepted into college? Do these numpties print their names when they have to sign a document? Or is it that people are just expected to learn how to write cursive on their own, outside the school system?

I can, R30. Ever hear of MS-DOS?

In undergrad (and especially grad school) I wrote code in SAS and SPSS, both statistical packages I also used at work. They're not used much anymore, of course; they've pretty much been replaced by the open-source R. I didn't bother to learn it because I don't work in that field anymore. I found I had much more fun teaching (college) than I had working with data, but I made a living at both.

But Jesus, R30 -- do you think your generation invented computers?

I would bet a lot of money I was writing code before you were born.

[quote]Cursive is irrelevant. Even elementary school kids use their school-issued tablets/laptops in the classroom.

Math is irrelevant. Even elementary school kids use the calculator apps on their school-issued tablets/laptops in the classroom. Let's stop teaching arithmetic/algebra/geometry as well. And languages (Google Translate can do all the work for them). And text-to-voice can just read for them too.

I was forced to learn Palmer Method cursive when I was in elementary school in the 80s. Even then I thought it was fussy and old-fashioned. I only used cursive when it was required for school assignemnts, and to this day have never used it otherwise.

r50 that's really dumb.

The eldergays will die on the hill of cursive!

[quote]A woman on television taught her 18-year-old grandson how to sign his name, knowing it will be needed on legal documents.

A printed name is legally fine.

[quote]How old and out of touch are the posters in this thread?

You must be new to Datalounge. They're still discussing intricacies of tv shows from 40 years ago.

[quote]Didn't you ever take a handwritten quiz or test?

[quote]In college we had to type papers but we still needed to write on paper sometimes. Or take notes.

And none of this happens in schools anymore.

r43 I went to school with plenty of kids who were taught cursive and they were fucking morons.

[quote]It is simply unfathomable to me that any school system in this country would stop teaching it. How the hell are people who were never taught cursive getting decent jobs in the workplace today? Or getting accepted into college? Do these numpties print their names when they have to sign a document? Or is it that people are just expected to learn how to write cursive on their own, outside the school system?

Please let this be a parody post and not serious.

Just wait until the eldergays find out that textbooks are no longer used.

They learnin coisev in Joisee, oh moi gawd.

I see what you did there, R50.

Too bad these idiots are sarcasm-challenged.

R60 = Carmela Soprano

I’m 50. Has anyone else tried writing a length letter/note lately? It’s hard! I do it so rarely that the muscles have atrophied. It hurts to get through a whole letter so I need breaks.

R63 my handwriting is atrocious. I need to practice. My mom is 87 and still has beautiful handwriting (no doubt the nuns beat it into students).

What exactly has changed so much about how much time it takes to teach basics? When I was in elementary we had our regular classroom instruction and work, snack time, lunch, and recess outside unless is was raining, and a rotating schedule of gym, art, music and library every day. The teachers managed to fit it all in. We all had to take NY state exams and our district was consistently in the top percentile.

r64 you didn't have computers or modern tech. That's a big part of the curriculum now. Cursive is archaic in the modern world.

I went to a private school in NJ that required cursive writing grades 5 - 8 (pre-computer era for this fossil). Hated it, never looked back, however ...

Taking the GRE (?) decades later required copying a short paragraph (cursive) anti-fraud/cheating measure. My sample was SO bad that they probably wondered "Which 'short bus' brought you there exactly?"

The only people I know who use cursive in their day to day lives are elderly.

R21,Grandmother interviewed this week during TV news story on brining Cursive back to schools.

The only people here who are against it, claiming "We're in 2025," never learned it.

This is one of the silliest threads I've ever seen on DL.

r69 I learned it in grade school in the 80s and I hated it. I wish it had never been taught.

MAGATs are infesting this thread.

Cursive has educational benefits. Why don’t we just discontinue learning musical instruments since we have drum machines and computer generated tracks to make music as well?

R70 is this silly, 24 states disagree with you and more are returning to handwriting.

r72 you are ridiculous.

Eldergays can't accept that the world has moved on.

This ship has sailed folks. I learned about this issue several years ago in the business world when we learned that marketing materials that used cursive basically automatically voided anyone under the age of about 35 from your target audience. It was kind of eye opening. It may as well have been hieroglyphics to them.

So while part of me feels sad that this will eventually become a specialty field for historians, I think we would get better mileage teaching kids basic fucking civics these days.

My eldergay Facebook friends still indent their paragraphs in Facebook comments instead of just using block paragraphs.

I'm surprised we haven't seen any posts yet about how beautiful Mother's cursive was and how she wrote her thank you notes with her special white gloves and a Mont Blanc pen and isn't it terrible that young people aren't being taught how to do this anymore.

I had to write out a simple condolence card recently and my hand completely cramped up. But I did use cursive!

Bottom line: Physical writing other than a signature is over. And even physical signatures are on their way out.

r79 I don't know of any company that does onboarding with paper anymore. They text or email you a link to all of your onboarding docs which you do digitally and you use an esignature. You do it all at home, it's fast and easy.

Cursive was a waste of time when I had to learn it ages ago. We should be teaching something useful like civics (the absence of which contributes to having low information voters).

I taught in New Jersey for many years, grades 1-6. Primary teachers in grade 1 taught print writing, students practiced the formation of block letters, which looked like the print in their books. Grade 2 introduced and instructed cursive writing, and in Grade 3 students perfected it and were expected to do written work in cursive by year's end. Once introduced, instruction was basically 30 minutes per day. Children were given workbooks to practice in at home.

As an education consultant within the last ten years, I was appalled at the illegible writing of most students. Some cobbled together print and cursive, spelling was also a mess. Whole language instruction ignored correcting young writers' spelling ,the thinking being it was stifling creativity and fluency. Rules of grammar and punctuation were also de-emphasized. These same students were using keyboards in every grade. The middle school kids are whizzes at googling, copying and pasting.

I just have one question. R75, et al., what makes you geniuses think the world will never move on from what you're doing [italic]now?[/italic]

My bff recently got a master's in Data Science online from Northwestern, and she has an MBA besides. It still took her six months to get a job.

I told her not to feel bad, because it wasn't her fault -- and sent her this article from the NYT.

[quote]what makes you geniuses think the world will never move on from what you're doing now?

Of course it will. You have to adapt. You can't stay in your hoarded hovel watching 40 year old episodes of Dynasty and living in the past.

R82: Teach them legible printing. That's all they need. Cursive is irrelevant and someone with decent fine motor skills can print as quickly as they can write. Are you planning to bring back those awful Dick & Jane readers, too, or do you prefer the equally silly phonics readers where everything seems to rhyme, but the content is vapid.

So much in education that was proven to work was thrown out by progressive educators. Where this happened we have kids who can neither spell, do basic math, write or read.

[quote] Cursive was a waste of time when I had to learn it ages ago.

You’re an idiot.

The rest of the English-speaking world learns cursive. Americans just keep getting dumber and dumber.

[quote] [R63] my handwriting is atrocious. I need to practice. My mom is 87 and still has beautiful handwriting (no doubt the nuns beat it into students).

Same here. My mother was a teacher and had beautiful penmanship but towards the end of her life I noticed that her writing was very time-consuming, like 5 times longer than it would take me to type the same thing. Handwriting is not time efficient.

[quote]Cursive is irrelevant. Even elementary school kids use their school-issued tablets/laptops in the classroom. Everything is typed now.

And yet, at least in my country, nobody teaches them to type either. That's scandalous. Touch typing is very easy to learn when you're 8 or 9 and love pressing buttons. I know this because my Mom had the sense to teach me. It would take at most one term of once a week classes to get most kids touch typing for preference, and that would include lessons in layout.

You can never get near the speed of a touch typist if you don't know the right fingers. Every time I have an "online chat" with a customer service person I'm waiting minutes for them to pick out their reply, and it takes me seconds to answer.

I can't see why kids can't learn cursive AND typing. Both are really good for developing (different) fine motor skills. Kids in elementary school don't do a lot of other things to develop those skills, which they will need later if they are going to go into woodwork, sewing-related fields etc.

R82 After decades of "Whole Word Learning" in NYC Public Schools, they've returned to teaching Phonics. Kids could read "cat," but couldn't figure out "catastrophe." Whole Word was created at Columbia Teachers College

To the elder gays screaming about civics classes. They’re well aware this antiquated government model isn’t working for them.

Better time would be spent contributing to efforts to restructuring this tired two party system.

R90 is Mavis Beacon!

R92 I still remember in Junior High, we had two one semester classes called “CPS” (Comparative Political Systems) and “CES” (Comparative Economic Systems). Examined US systems to others around the world. That’s the kind of Civics classes I’d like to see reinstated.

And we wonder why young people hired today only last a very short time on the job before they either quit because they just can't do a 40 hour work week, or they"re fired for incompetence.

And it's all because they didn't learn cursive r95 🙄

Unlike many of you, I actually know and work with Gen Zers (I'm at the tail end of Gen X) and they're great. Hard working and quite competent.

Well R96, that's only by Millennial standards.

No r97 it's by real world standards.

Phonics isn't going to teach someone to go from "cat" to "catastrophe" because of all the irregularities in English. The only place where phonics really works any better is with learning disabilities that affect sound-symbol matching and even there the irregular patterns in English are a problem. Also, content needs to be motivating---publishers make "high interest readers" for children in the older elementary grades which are far more interesting than the usual drivel and often written by writers for adult audiences.

As for "progressive education" it's been so rarely tried and so poorly executed that its rarely received a fair test. Someone has been consuming far too much useless cable news. What been problematic in our most recent cycle of made-up educational crises has been the reliance/misuse of tests. Teachers teach to the test or outright cheat. The whole point of testing is to look at a sample of behavior and not do it so often that people learn the test content for its own sake.

It’s not so much being able to write in cursive, but the Reddit sub where kids bring cursive document to the elders for translation is a weird one.

It’s like olds are oracles who know an esoteric form of the language that must be interpreted for the less knowledgeable.

It’s concerning that common knowledge can be lost in two generations. Cursive, and what else?

I really didn’t expect this thread to become the argument it is.

"I" before "e" except when it isn't.

Aside from the need to correctly sign your name on a legal document, cursive writing is dead.

Most elementary students have no idea what "cursive" even means. To be fair, most don't know who the President is either.

I suffered through the roll out of the metric system in elementary school and look how well that turned out.

Kids can't read or even show up to school post-pandemic. It seems to me this kind of effort could be put to better use.

We learned it in grade two (1966) and called it 'real writing' for some reason. We used the Maclean method which was based on Palmer, I believe. This brings back memories - we had to angle our copy books a certain was and place a 'guideline' under the page to train the proper slant of the letters.

I was impatient and messy. Had good grades in everything but penmanship. At some point, grade four maybe, they stopped grading penmanship.

Oh jeez r46, I’ve never thought of that. I’m a graphic designer doing a lot of package design and I love using “handwriting” and script fonts, have hundreds of them, and use them frequently. Clients haven’t complained (not about that anyway). Never occurred to me that a certain segment of the population can no longer decipher them. Too funny (sob).

Adding, maybe that’s why Lord & Taylor went out of business. Young ‘uns couldn’t read the name.

I remember reading years ago that one guy was responsible for writing the name. He did it freehand on all the advertising. What a job!

People who can’t make out professionally printed cursive words from common fonts are not the brightest. An M looks like a M. A P looks like a P.

I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt if they can’t figure out Q.

While we’re at it, let’s teach the kids how to dial a phone with a pencil.

The whole point of cursive was that it is faster to write with a pen .

Nobody writes with a pen anymore.

The fact that learning this skill develops other skills is not enough to justify spending time on learning an archaic skill. Teach them to read and write Asian words . Same skill set, and far more useful.

R105 Your clients haven’t complained about cursive fonts because the decision makers are likely over 35. But watch for this to change. I was dumbfounded when this was presented to me. We immediately stopped using cursive in materials moving forward.

My husband was doing his masters at the time and was in class with a lot of 20 somethings. He asked around and it was pretty universal that cursive may as well have been Sanskrit. Sure if they stopped and stared and tried to decipher something they probably could. But in the world of marketing, you get one chance to grab someone’s attention. If you need them to “translate”, you’ve lost the game.

[quote]So much in education that was proven to work was thrown out by progressive educators.

Oh MAGAt, you have no idea of the effort behind making you feel that it is "progressive educators" as the cause of the collapse of our educational system, once the envy of the world and now rapidly headed off a cliff as religious loons work to set the clock back a hundred or more years while oligarchs cheer the tax breaks coming their way. Education isn't cheap no matter how you look at it, but it is going to be far costlier for our society when entire swaths of the populace can neither read nor write, let alone do simple arithmetic.

[quote]As for "progressive education" it's been so rarely tried and so poorly executed that its rarely received a fair test.

The monied class fears progressive education, and with good cause: when it was tried, we taught things like civics, history and literature which resulted in a society that demanded things like Social Security, Medicare, the Civil and Voting Rights Acts, worked to send a man to the moon, invented the internet, and resulted in a healthy, thriving middle class. I say it again: we can have nice things, or we can have billionaires, but we can't have both. The billionaires know this, so they went after and destroyed progressive education before it had a chance to produce a second generation that would have demanded free secondary education, single-payer healthcare, a guaranteed basic income and investment in modern infrastructure (think of bullet trains in Japan, for instance).

We've let the perfect be the enemy of the good, and what confounds me is that no one, as R86's regressive comment symbolizes, understands that perfection is unattainable on a societal scale and we are much better off with our good system than we ever will be under authoritarianism, billionaires and a stratified class-based system of privilege by birth. Nevertheless, we're about to find out... the hard way.

Curriculum needs to align with the skills kids will need in the real world. Sadly, I can’t really think of any practical need for knowing this.

On a similar note, do schools still teach algebra, geometry, trigonometry and calculus? Or have they caved to teach the much more useful skill: Excel.

tl;dr r111

[quote]r8 = They should also teach them to send telegraphs and use a fax machine...

Oh dear.

The Palmer Method, for reference. When I was forced to learn this as a child in the 1980s I thought it was ridiculously fussy and old-fashioned. I just hated it. I only used this archaic cursive when it was required by teachers in school and never at any other time.

I'm glad they don't teach this shit to kids anymore.

What is the symbol between the lower case q and r on r115’s card?

Also between upper case E and F?

R116 Good question!

^^ I honestly can't remember. I want to say that at least with the symbol next to the upper case E it's an alternate way to write the capital F but I'm really not sure.

I cannot believe posters calling cursive "shit" and useless.

One response to that...

You are stupid.

No r120, it's useless. Look at that fucking Palmer Method chart. Ridiculously fussy.

It's not useless, R121. Go read the love letters your grandparents exchanged with each other.

Between the 5 speed standard transmission truck I drive, and the cursive I use when writing, I feel invincible against these younger generations.

Read and learn

[quote]Between the 5 speed standard transmission truck I drive, and the cursive I use when writing, I feel invincible against these younger generations.

Nobody cares.

I do!

𝒴𝑜𝓊 𝒸𝑜𝓊𝓁𝒹 𝓊𝓈𝑒 𝒶 𝓉𝑒𝓍𝓉 𝒻𝑜𝓃𝓉 𝓉𝓇𝒶𝓃𝓈𝓁𝒶𝓉𝑜𝓇 to impress someone with your cursive skills. I print when writing music critiques of young kids. I notice my own students can't read the cursive handwriting of their judges. When I want something more elegant than my normal printing in a personal note to a friend, or a condolence card, I will often slip in a note on nice stationary, printed on my computer using a nice font, As I recall, there's a Lucida Handwriting font, and also a sort of informal but very legible "printed by hand" font. I can't remember the name of that one, although I like it and use it a lot. I'm still able to write cursive, but it's slow for me and I have to stop and think about how to make some capital letters in cursive. 2 for Q for instance.

But to answer some of the questions/concerns above, NO ONE KNOWS THE PURPOSE OF EDUCATION. Is it to make us more able to do some sort of work? Is it to make us more similar to one another, in that we will have read the same books and gotten some of the same information? Is it to make us happier? Is it to make us fit better into the wider society around us? Is it to make us more empathetic and open to people whose life experiences have been very different from our own? Is it to confirm us in our own natural prejudices or to accept unquestioningly, the dictates of our parents and our government? Is it to make us critical thinkers, who analyze every bit of information that comes our way through the lenses of logic and common sense? Is it to learn to know ourselves, and to become aware of all the impulses that motivate us and the demons we all possess?

Seen through that focus, cursive seems a small part of the overall educational picture. It's probably one of a dozen or so things that I think should be taught to all kids, no matter their aptitude, for at least a short period of time, to engage and link up muscles and mind, including dance, a musical instrument, yoga or similar physical training, etc.

I remembered the font that I used for elegant, somewhat masculine "handprinted" writing. It's SEGOE Print.

Absolutely! Bring back cursive.

Everyone should know how to write.

R127 My tl;dr wants to find the one WW and attack you and them with FFs.

[quote]When I want something more elegant than my normal printing in a personal note to a friend, or a condolence card, I will often slip in a note on nice stationary, printed on my computer using a nice font,

[quote]I remembered the font that I used for elegant, somewhat masculine "handprinted" writing. It's SEGOE Print.

Fussy old cursive for a fussy old prissy queen.

[quote]𝒴𝑜𝓊 𝒸𝑜𝓊𝓁𝒹 𝓊𝓈𝑒 𝒶 𝓉𝑒𝓍𝓉 𝒻𝑜𝓃𝓉 𝓉𝓇𝒶𝓃𝓈𝓁𝒶𝓉𝑜𝓇 to impress someone with your cursive skills.

Where? A fucking nursing home?

It was probably 3rd grade when we started to learn cursive, the Palmer method of course. Posters printed with white letters on dark green were above the blackboard. Even back then, I looked at that 2 pretending to be Q and thought that ain’t right.

It’s interesting how you can look at the handwriting from other countries and tell where they’re from right away. (And not because they’re writing in their own language). So now I wonder if French and German schools have this same issue re dropping cursive?

Employers firing Gen Z workers right and left.

R90

[quote]Every time I have an "online chat" with a customer service person I'm waiting minutes for them to pick out their reply, and it takes me seconds to answer.

That’s because they’re talking to five other people at the same time.

R10, have you seen the reading and math scores in the public schools in NYC and Chicago lately? Truancy rates? SAT scores? Security measures? Crime statistics?

Remember the thing that held three pieces of chalk the teacher would use to draw lines on the chalkboard to teach writing. I distinctly remember my first grade teacher doing that on the first day. I thought she was drawing the American flag. Boy, was I wrong. Once she started writing letters (cursive would come in 3rd grade), half the class started crying hysterically. I was mystified by their reaction.

If "nobody writes anything any more" as some here claim, why do Post-Its exist (and do a thriving business)? Why does my supermarket sell 6 varieties of spiral notebooks, memo books, etc.? Not to mention Staples and Walmart selling these things. Who's buying all these 3 Subject College-Ruled Notebooks? 80 year olds? What about all the highlighters and pens that are sold? Racks and racks of pens at Walmart. A lot of kids like Pilot G-2 pens. So they must use pens.

It's good that I'm long retired and no longer hiring and firing people, because if someone came in for an interview who couldn't write cursive they wouldn't get past the first interview.

Just look around. The ability to speak, write and reason has improved so much in the couple of decides where students only have to learn what is levant now or what they think is important.

/relevant [I wouldn't have made that mistake in cursive :) ]

^ decades wasn’t in cursive

You guys make it sound as if you should learn kurrent. Cursive is great because it allows you to make one flowing movement without lifting the pen too often, also speeding up writing. It's so much easier than w r i t i n g s i n g l e .. letters by hand.

After writing my check in cursive this morning at the supermarket checkout, the poor checkout girl couldn't read it!

I was briefly thrown in special ed because my cursive was atrocious. My math and reading skills were fine but they had me doing basic math with dots in third grade. My mom had to intervene. I don’t use cursive except for when signing stuff. It still looks like crap.

Nobody thought records and record players would ever be used again, either.

[quote]It's good that I'm long retired and no longer hiring and firing people, because if someone came in for an interview who couldn't write cursive they wouldn't get past the first interview.

You would be reprimanded for refusing to hire/firing people for something so frivolous. And they would just think "WTF?" and think you were a very strange relic.

And the arrogance of r10 is another reason people ran to vote for trump, you do realize that a lot of the stupid people in Al and OK are blacks who can't read at level either, like the ignorant Magas? And the blacks couldn't be bothered to vote, nevermind that the the Yankees up north voted for trump too, go ff r10 and DO IT NOW before you forget.

The Palmer methods apparently went out of favor in the 50s--we have some ancient writers here and that they know it was the Palmer methods makes it even worse.

I'll bet we'll be seeing posts about sentence diagramming next! That was another waste of time.

R149 Sentence diagraming a waste of time? How dare you!

I really do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagramming sentences.

I was the best boy in early grades in penmanship, spelling, and sentence diagramming. I no longer remember all the names of the parts of speech. Oh, and I'm from New Jersey.

We really didn't spend that much time learning to write. I don't know why people are getting so bent out of shape over the idea of kids learning cursive.

They might as well learn cursive. They're not learning anything else.

That’s not true r149. Or maybe my school was behind the times.

[quote]The Palmer methods apparently went out of favor in the 50s--we have some ancient writers here and that they know it was the Palmer methods makes it even worse.

The Palmer Method was still being taught in the 1980s, I was forced to learn it in third grade. I hated it, as did many other kids. I wish I'd never learned it.

BTW my third grade teacher was a bitch on wheels who never should've been allowed anywhere near children but that's a whole other story.

I learned cursive in second grade in the late 1990s and I’ve never heard of the Palmer method.

R151: I'm guessing you're as much fun now as you were when you were diagraming sentences.

Nice, the country falling apart and people worrying about cursive writing? Priorities you know, stupid assholes.

You will find a spate of sources that will inform you.

A spate of articles written by people who will lose jobs if they don't teach cursive, bitter old nasty gay retired English teachers, we just buried our bitter old nasty gay retired English teacher friend, he was a tortured mess like many on here, I can recognize the angst here when I read it.

As stubborn as you young'uns are about learning [bold]anything,[/bold] I don't know if/why you bothered to learn how to wipe your asses.

Young? Most of us are 40+

I’m watching a movie and just paused it to note that all the opening credits are a script (similar to Brush Script) so I imagine that some time in the future they will be unintelligible to the viewing audience. Interesting.

R21, 1960s.

They’ll be legible to the rest of the Western world except American kids who were dumbed down and can’t even read their own historical documents. That’s great for the government as they won’t be able to read the Bill of Rights.

[quote] Kids can't read all kinds of old documents if they don't learn cursive.

So does this current lack of skill mean that they couldn't even read the original of the U.S. Declaration of Independence?

I couldn't locate a web page with a decent high-resolution image of the original.

[quote] In college we had to type papers but we still needed to write on paper sometimes. Or take notes.

At least some college students these days use a laptop to take class notes. Try sitting in a classroom trying to focus on the lecture and hearing incessant key tapping in the background. It's really annoying.

Uncritical adoption of information technology is stupid. Some applications and functions fuck up ALL THE TIME. The whole industry is a racket to which the population is held captive.

Try using the google version of Excel. The full functionality is simply not there. Compare the functionality and interface of Outlook to gmail in a business setting if you have an email intensive job. But, oh the (cheesy) novelty of things!

Humans beings are just a bunch of stupid conformist sheep.

Here's a bit of the preamble to the Constitution in its original form, r164. At least the first sentence or so should be in high enough resolution to read on a computer.