FULLERTON, California (Reuters) - A generation of children who learned to write on screens is now going old school.
Starting this year, California grade school students are required to learn cursive handwriting, after the skill had fallen out of fashion in the computer age.
Assembly Bill 446, sponsored by former elementary school teacher Sharon Quirk-Silva and signed into law in October, requires handwriting instruction for the 2.6 million Californians in grades one to six, roughly ages 6 to 12, and cursive lessons for the “appropriate” grade levels - generally considered to be third grade and above.
Experts say learning cursive improves cognitive development, reading comprehension and fine motor skills, among other benefits. Some educators also find value in teaching children to read historic documents and family letters from generations past.
This is so alien to me, do other Europeans struggle with cursive? Is it a geography or an age thing?
Personally, it feels like a natural way to write and link letters quickly. I think it’s taught in a backwards way, and a lot of people never develop their calligraphy skills because of that, but once you understand the point of cursive, it makes sense. And it’s one more way to express yourself. It can be as legible/ambiguous as you want to make it. You can add fancy ligatures, or keep it clean.
I’ve always struggled with it. Often people let it degrade into a line with tiny bumps, and it becomes illegible.
Personally I am Autistic and have ADHD, so the fine motor control is hard to manage. I can’t write cursive neatly, but if I slow right down I can “draw” cursive.
Growing up undiagnosed when I did, has developed a hardy set of calluses across the knuckles from teachers hitting them with a ruler for bad pen grip or messy writing.
Most of those fuckers are dead or in diapers now.
Damn, that’s a terrible experience, I am truly sorry you went through all that. Those teachers are the dregs, fuck them.
If you are European it may be surprising to learn that most of the world’s cursive is not the same as the US. Learning cursive in much of the world is closer to joined-writing, where the form is more personal to the individual and the explicit purpose is speed (at least for right handed people). Learning cursive in the US is learning a bastardized form of joined-writing that has much lost its original purpose as a side effect of attempting to heavily standardize its form.
Thanks for the explanation! That’s exactly what I was wondering about, especially after reading some more comments in this thread. Sounds like it is an unfortunate consequence of how cursive is taught :(