Teaching Cursive Writing

Cursive writing was taught to everyone in the Ridgewood School System usually in the third grade. We were admonished to write our signatures neatly as this would likely be the same style we would use for the rest of our lives.

Implied in this warning was the strongly held opinion that something we did now would have repercussions much later in our lives. The same thing was said about cracking one's knuckles but to this was adding a warning about some hideous deformity which would surely afflict one's hands if you continued to crack your knuckles.

I heeded the second warning but am one of many I know who has let their cursive skills atrophy. The fear now is that with the use of computers some students many never learn cursive, except to sign their names. This would be a shame as there is an artistic skill which can inherently be taught along with cursive writing, even if I am not an art lover who makes this a personal practice.

Some educators are going as far as to complain that children are "losing time where they create beauty every day." These same people have a hard time making this a practical argument for cursive. Probably because they are mourning the beauty and the aesthetics of an increasingly lost artistic skill as well as an ability to read historical documents like the US Constitution in its original form.

Though this begs the question whether cursive is a 21st century skill. I am on the fence as to whether it is one. I do remember being kept after school because my handwriting was bad, though a lot of good this did me.

I have no problem with the teaching of cursive if it is placed in the context that those who learn to write by hand learn better. I recall it mostly as a rote exercise devoid of attempts at creating something appealing to gaze at or that by learning to write clearly by hand would make me a more capable student in the future.

Sometimes all it takes is a change of context for a seemingly cryptic lesson to become, in the words of the poet John Keats "a thing of beauty." In the end the argument for teaching cursive might come down to whether we want to teach our children be added that a thing of beauty can also be a joy for ever.