(This week’s civic education and engagement column from Danville’s The Republican newspaper.)
There are many topics about public schools that get some people a little worked up. But few provoke the same emotional reaction – at least for folks of a certain age – as cursive handwriting.
(Full disclosure: my report cards included just one failing mark over the years. For Penmanship. In second grade, no less. This may or may not affect my take on cursive writing, the Palmer Method, or any related topics.)
Frankly, the reason most districts spend little if any time teaching cursive is that it’s nearly obsolete. You may not want to hear that, but it’s absolutely true. The days of handwritten essays and term papers disappeared quickly as the youngest students learned to type on keyboards. Walk into today’s schools, and you won’t find inkwells, mimeograph machines, chalkboards, or the other technologies that many of us remember. Today’s kids will never get to take a deep whiff of a mimeographed (dittoed) test paper … and from a health standpoint, that’s probably a good thing.
Some seem to believe the inevitable and imminent departure of cursive will destroy society. “My grandchildren won’t be able to read my notes.” They will if you print them instead of writing them in cursive. “How will today’s kids write checks?” How many checks do you write these days? How much longer do you think paper checks will even be a thing? “They have to be able to sign their names!” Not if they’re using biometric identifiers like facial recognition. And my favorite: “How will they ever read the Declaration of Independence?” You may go into your attic and unroll that scroll of crinkly, yellowed paper with the tiny writing. As for me, I’ll do what the kids will do: google it.
Wait, you plead, can’t we just take some time to teach cursive? Well, there are only so many hours in a school day and a school year. School today isn’t like what you remember. It’s tougher, in many ways. Over the last several decades, we’ve expanded and accelerated what we expect kids to learn. If you read through Indiana’s Academic Standards, you’ll probably recognize concepts you learned in high school being taught at the elementary level.
Those standards list everything the state expects every student in every grade to know about every subject by the end of the current school year. Frankly, that’s unrealistic because it’s unattainable. The best teacher you ever encountered is doomed to fail – not because of any lack of competence, but because of a simple lack of time. There are no spare hours, so emphasizing cursive would demand forgoing some of those legally mandated requirements.
And the state just keeps piling it on. Most General Assembly sessions result in new subject matter requirements and new classes. Parents want to see classes for other languages like Latin, Russian, and Chinese, as well as broad expansions of fine arts programs … and classes on subjects that have traditionally been considered family responsibilities, like financial management, cooking, and how to change a flat tire. Nearby everyone complains that there’s not enough career education (although most Hoosiers have no clue about just how much more is available to today’s students).
Yet for decades, we haven’t added any hours to the school day, nor days to the school year. So we simply put more pressure on classroom teachers to cram even more into every day while simultaneously wondering why so few young people see teaching as a viable career. And then we get angry when those teachers don’t carve hours out of those days to teach kids a writing style that’s within a couple years of being as useless as an inkwell at every desk.
Personally, I’d rather my grandkids spend that time learning things that will prepare them for success in the world they’ll occupy as adults.