Comment by mgas | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mgas | Hacker News Reader

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Here's my take:

The author was born in the 90s, and was in elementary and middle school in the 2000s, when keyboarding was already seen as a primary skill. His take that "nobody writes cursive anymore" is true, given that for him, "everyone" is under the age of 30. Those of us who grew up prior to personal computers and phone touchscreens being ubiquitous can scream all we want "I learned cursive and I still write it!", but it doesn't change all that much. Some of us learned and it and can't do it any longer. Some of learned it and still do it, for whatever personal or professional reason.

Here's the hotter take:

Skills like handwriting are (hold on to your hankerchiefs graphologists!) pseudo-sciences. They are vestiges of elitist education systems, whereby a bunch of rich, but likely average-intelligence, students who paid for elite education, hired private instructors to help them become members of the "learned class". It doesn't take any special intelligence to teach or to learn, and can be used as a signal to others that you "belong" to the upper class.

Fast forward to the 90s, in rural North Carolina, to a grossly underfunded school system that can't afford specialized training for teachers or students. What do we get? Over insistence on out-dated markers of education: cursive, Cotillion, woodshop for boys and home ec for girls. What don't we get? Computer science, math beyond algebra and geometry, science beyond basic earth science, and US history that stops at WWII! 1600 students with excellent penmanship, who know how to waltz, but none of us is even aware that computers can be programmed or that people get paid money to do it.

And to the commenters claiming graphology is a thing or that it is in any way useful in sorting candidates for job opportunities (I'm looking at you France), you are just as wrong as the author who claims "I don't use cursive, so nobody uses it either".

NB: This is not an attack on the hobbyists, or on the aesthetics of cursive in general. Well-written cursive is marvelous. I just think we had too much emphasis on it it school, and likely it was due to our schools not having the wherewithall to teach us anything else of value.

Cursive may well functionally fill the role of social class shibboleth in certain circumstances and specific social environments, but that is very secondary to its highly practical primary function: you can write _much faster_ in cursive than by any other means.

There were no typewriters or computers through almost all of human history. Writing was it. This skill had, and to a large degree even today still has, enormous practical and economic value.

The utility of this ability to efficiently produce text artifacts is vastly higher when one can do so in a manner that is readily legible to others, which requires that one use an approximation of standardized, well-known glyphs. The closer you can produce them, the more differentially legible your written output is to others. It's not merely a coded signal for your elite status.

Even today when many can take notes on a keyboard, writing notes by hand has a well studied secondary practical effect of improving retention and comprehension, as well as being available any time a pencil and paper are at hand. These still work when dropped, when they get wet, when the power is out, or when you forgot to charge them.

Agree on all accounts, except for paper working when wet. :P

You can read it after it gets wet, mostly / sometimes. Writing is another story.

> woodshop

I learned math and programming but I wish I'd also taken wood shop (and metal shop, and other practical courses.)

Making actual stuff with your hands and using physical tools is immensely satisfying and empowering. I really crave it after spending all of my time staring at a screen and typing on a keyboard.

Other practical skills like personal finance, home improvement and maintenance, and cooking can pay dividends for the rest of your life.

I wish I'd had more time for many courses (also including music, art, drama, etc.) that weren't part of the "college prep" track.

100000% agree. I would have loved to get more practical stuff in high school, and less fluff. Woodworking is a lifetime skill, and contributed to my understanding of spatial organization, practical math, fractions, and precision. Plus now I can make stuff.

Cooking as well. I worked in kitchens for 7 years during and after college, and wouldn't trade that knowledge for the world.

I only mentioned woodworking and home ec since they were gender-assigned by the school, not because they were less useful.

I learned how to operate tools safely in woodshop and it's one of the more valuable skills I picked up from my school days. I've forgotten most of my Spanish, almost all of the math, but I remember how to keep my fingers.

> And to the commenters claiming graphology is a thing or that it is in any way useful in sorting candidates for job opportunities

It is useful, just not in a way that many people find acceptable. It is a marker of a particular sort of "elite" education. Your comment that this surfaces a "bunch of rich, but likely average-intelligence" people is true, but it misses the point. It's not meant to reveal intelligence, but whether a person is "one of us" — the right sort, a safe pair a hands, a sound fellow, etc. The decision-makers care much less about intelligence than whether they can be trusted to "do the right thing," which is whatever maintains elites in their position—exactly what these people have been brought up to do by their parents and educated to do by elite institutions.

I was arguing that, in Europe, and France specifically, it's a way to see whether or not a potential candidate is "French" enough. It's expounded as a psychological tool (orthographists and graphologists are paid to psychoanalyze you based on written documents that you MUST submit), but in the end, it leads to a gray area of racism and classism.

For clarity, this post was more creative writing exercise than technical treatise.

That's cool. This type of thing just sparks something in my brain. I learned cursive because it was beat into me. As soon as I could abandon it I did, and for good reason too. My cursive was terrible and dyslexic, and block text was much easier to write and to read.

The other stuff I wrote is secondary to your post, and just a hot take. Thanks for the stimulating article though!

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