Gen Z never learned to read cursive

In high school (gawd, 30 years ago now), we had to memorize the opening of Canterbury Tales in Old English. I can still recite the first few lines. Why? What was the point of forcing students to do that? It's taking up precious space in the very limited memory banks. Instead, I can't remember if the arguments for the explode function has the string then the separator or the separator and then the string.

The tricky thing here is while we're transitioning away from some of these things, they still often serve as signals of class and overall quality of education.

I don't know about that - writing something out is still the best way to learn and retain something long-term.

Here is a counterpoint. The US foundational documents (Declaration, Constitution) are written in cursive/script. Public education certainly has something to do with creating citizens capable of participating in US democracy and reading these docs is one significant part of that. Obviously they can be transcribed so I don’t think this is super compelling but perhaps it is not anachronistic as it seems.

And nobody will recognize the errors Google Lens makes

Nothing of value was lost. Over-complex communication usually was a attempt to keep others with less time to learn and practice out of the communication stream. Similar to kanji, who a peasant would not learn at scale and couldn't even improvise phonetically to written form.

Actually, your failover system makes me feel anxious inside.

What if this proprietary tech gone missing or disappeared completely?

What if this proprietary tech gone rogue and just refused to cooperate and render the service for end users for any given reason?

I just can't trust one single vendor or corporation with such a critical part of our life but your main point remains salient though.

English customary units for mass, length and volume. I went to American public schools and I was never taught any of these, except I think a single quiz about them in the cooking portion of my home economics class (which was also cut from the curriculum a few years ago.) All the science classes were taught with metric, and no other classes taught units for these things at all. The only customary units I have an intuitive understanding of are pounds, miles, and Fahrenheit. Off the top of my head I can't even tell you how many feet are in a mile, and to me a yard is 'about a meter.' I estimate small distances in meters and multiply by 3 to give other Americans an estimate in feet.

Good thing the rest of the world uses this amazing system where a kilothing is a thousand of a thing eh.

I was all for "maximum personal cyborg-ness" at an earlier stage of life, but I now feel the urge to be away from the screen+keyboard for some time, and pen-and-paper is a good fit for that, and ... cursive writing is just a good way of _using_ pen and paper.

As long as you are physically embodied, you're going to feel some satisfaction in "doing things with your hands" (i.e. other than typing or pointing).

Making marks on a writing medium in a quick, _flowing_ way, using a writing instrument ... is a form of communication, or even a form of expression, that you can do quite well if you try a little bit.

In my elementary school we were taught non-slanted cursive, which was billed as more readable but also slower to write. Learning it involved copying text and having it judged, there was hardly any practice in reading cursive writing, maybe 5 birthday cards worth.

Occasionally there would be an old-fashioned teacher who would write on the board in cursive, and I'd just listen to them and mostly go by what they said out loud.

It used to be that banks would compare signatures to approve/decline checks. What are checks you ask? Exactly!

It used to be that tellers would compare signatures from the back of your card to the signature you just scribbled on the receipt to ensure it was really your card. (when's the last time if ever someone asked to see the signature on your card or compared the card info to your gov't issued ID?) Now, the PoS units have digital pads for signatures. Has anyone anywhere ever had their digital signature look anything like their written signature? I've never signed a digital pad the same way twice.

[Edit]

Just remembered that it was the other way around for my dad. Only cursive was taught in primary school, but in college, he had a drafting course where he learned print, so his print is incredibly legible.

Also, I love cursive. I had terrible fine motor skills when I learned print, but had developed by 3rd grade, so my print is illegible, but cursive is fine.

Learning to write is as important as learning to read and learning to do math. There are good ways and bad ways to learn.

It's too bad this skill is being neglected and people turn to measurably worse methods of learning.

Middle school: Hey computers are cool let's learn how to use them

High school: Assignments should all be typed and printed at home before class.

College Freshman: Times New Roman. 12pt. Double Spaced. Any papers not following these rules will be marked as 0. Printing costs 25c/page in the library.

College Senior: Times New Roman. 12pt. Double Spaced. Microsoft word file format. All papers must be submitted to the online portal and plagiarism checker by 11:59pm on the due date.

Fast forward to college where I took a number of Russian language courses. I had to learn cursive… with Cyrillic script. Reversing my elementary school position, I decided I wanted to be good at cursive in Russian. I never had great motor control, but damned if my cursive writing in Russian wasn’t head and shoulders better than anything I’ve ever written in English!

I have lately thought that maybe I should relearn cursive in English. I like being away from screens and my printed handwriting is pretty slow and ugly. Now cursive seems like a way to do work away from the shackles of my laptop.

As for signatures, my kids use print letters for their signatures since they have no clue how to even write their names in cursive.

Starting out in the American system I hadn't been taught cursive at all, writing in print was normal. Right before I left we had just started typing lessons. They had convinced my parents that trying to force me to write with my right hand despite being a lefty was wrong.

Then I spent two years in an Indian private school, where they were rather nasty about how not knowing cursive reflected poorly on me (a similar nastiness came in solving some math problems in a different way, imagine humiliating an 8-9 year old in front of the class on their first day about how stupid they are for solving a set of math problems differently despite the solutions still being correct). I had to just sort of pick up cursive on my own, so while it was mostly okay there were some letters I wrote differently from "proper" cursive. On top of that they required gel pens rather than ball point, leading to my writing being extra prone to smears (not to mention always having ink stained backs of fingers). Typing assignments wasn't really a thing and computer classes were generally meaningless things about how to make wordart.

Then I moved to another country, where an Indian public school was the only option available. At this point I was old enough that they didn't push too hard on writing in cursive in general schoolwork, although there were still things like handwriting contests where they claimed that I would've won if I hadn't written my capital H's differently. Not too big of a deal but that still seemed to emphasize cursive writing as some measure of success. Notably even at this point I still got treated poorly by some teachers for things like my American accent (which included complaints to my parents, although they ignored the complaints because I was always expected to go back to America for university).

Finally I moved again and this time ended up in a school based on the Ontario education system (although not located in Canada). At this point no one really cared how I wrote or spoke. Despite my accent making me sound like a native speaker I turned out to need some catch-up English classes but on the other hand I had managed to skip grades for math, physics and biology.

Nowadays I rarely ever write by hand and when I do it's usually still digital like on a tablet. I have a couple of ink pens still around but I use them so rarely that I almost always have to search for them when needed.

Early L1 development concerns aside, learning cursive was a pretty good ROI for me given how little time it took as a seven year-old, and how much time cursive has saved me over the years since.

Related research:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7399101/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4274624/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5422512/

Not only does that require substantial backup, it also sidesteps the problem of writing. There will come a point when you need it. Heck, if the war in Ukraine gets out of control, it may become a necessity. Your phone might just stop working.

And there's nothing wrong with being taught two ways of achieving the same. Or do you only know one way to add? One way to program? One way to throw a ball? It might even make the process more flexible and adaptable.

If you need to write by hand a lot, cursive is vastly more efficient and fast, as you don't need to lift the pen/pencil from the paper as often. You mostly glide over the paper.

Cursive was extremely practical or fast note-taking, so why cursive was a thing was pretty obvious. It was also normal to write in cursive for homework, tests, exams. I am still using it at work today. And if I were to go back to school, I would definitely use it again, although my touch-typing is decent enough that I could keep pace.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterless_printing

I'm 56 and essentially can't write decent cursive anymore since like decades as I stopped as soon as I could. No problems reading when it's correctly written, but as a leftie I found cursive handwriting hard since day one, so I resorted to capitals only, save for my signature, which however is different every time: I have 5 filed at the bank as I can't produce two seemingly identical; I often joke with the clerk that for me would be a lot easier if they asked for a blood sample for DNA recognition:)

I believe we were taught cursive to build motor skills. My teachers always gave me good remarks for my neat handwriting, and I remember spending hours practicing both regular and cursive characters. Fill out the sheet, then my mom would erase it and I would do it again and again.

I would suspect the same is true of cursive Latin script, in the same way.

The same is true about Fraktur (the old German script), and yet few people are capable of reading pre-1940 books typeset in Fraktur.

There is no way around it, the vast majority of people won't learn old scripts and they won't be able to read their grandparents' correspondence etc.

This might be worth the progress, but let's not pretend that the continuity rupture is smaller than it is.

In my university you had to write so fast to follow the teachers that if you were not writing using cursive you were probably missing half of the content.

I was forced to waste hundreds of hours of my life getting instruction in an arcane, obsolete format.

> That future generations are cut off from old writings is nonsense.

Some of us are cut off anyway, until the writing is either OCR'd or manually transcribed. I'm legally blind (though with some usable vision), and some of my friends are totally blind. I can read handwriting if it's magnified enough, or large enough to begin with, but my skill for deciphering handwriting has faded due to disuse. It's very rarely a problem anymore.

Some of my least happy memories from elementary school are of learning to handwrite. My teachers quite reasonably thought that I would be better off if I learned to make maximal use of the vision I have. It made sense at the time (the 80s and early 90s); if I had only been proficient at writing in Braille or on a computer, I would have had no way to write something in-class that could then be immediately read by my sighted teachers and peers (unless I used the one classroom computer, as I sometimes did). But now I wish I had started learning Braille in first grade, and that they had made me keep using it even when I thought I didn't need it. And these days, any low-vision kid shouldn't have to waste any time at all learning to handwrite. Honestly, I wish they'd quit teaching sighted kids to handwrite too, so future generations wouldn't produce any more text that's inaccessible to us. But I suppose that's too extreme.

No. It is because this system is objectively and obtusely hard.

Really, C looks like an L, B looks like an L, T looks like whatever, V looks like anything but a V etc

This is not about practice, this is about who invented this being obtuse (the polite word I'm using here)

Fraktur is weird but it is mostly readable. Older cursive methods mostly are readable (I mean, except Kurrent - though even it looks like a bit better than Sütterlin - and the Russian system). This looks like a bad joke for real

https://wikiless.org/wiki/Kurrent?lang=en

Source: My (Swedish) grandfather taught me how to do genealogical research.

As mentioned in the article; indeed, you can replace cursive with <insert old script here> and the article would be the same lamentation for an audience of a different time.

I do think that a part of it was more of an upstream bottleneck in my mind, but part of me wonders if training that sort of writing skill helps with mental agility as well.

But when they showed it in action, it couldn’t do cursive “because nobody writes cursive anyway”, according to the American developer.

At the time, I assumed that the guy just made that claim to excuse a serious limitation of his software: why would anyone not write cursive (which is faster)?

As in, it might have also read "Japanese calligraphy". Gives the HR person to ask about their passions a bit, figure out how they roll?

(Disregard that idea if this was actually just listed as a core job skill like "Word and Excel experience")

At some point a handwritten "letter of motivation" was also a de facto requirement for job applications, and not writing it in cursive would not even come to the mind of anyone - precisely because it variability gave it a more "personal" vibe, a feeling that was exploited by the bogus graphology pseudo-science [1] at that time.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphology

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%BCtterlin

Touch typing is not necessary to type fast.

I also show them ctrl+F and they think I'm a magician...

https://i.imgur.com/KEmhkXx.jpg

I had to Google what cursive is to make sure I understood the article. Cursive just feels like a slightly different font to me. I have a hard time wrapping my head around people being unable to read it.

Both methods are about on par with phone typing or dictation, and far far slower than typing on a physical keyboard. I recently tried to switch back to a paper notebook because I found my phone was constantly distracting me when taking notes, but the loss of text search, ease of sharing/editing, and and speed when writing was too great so I abandoned this approach in favor of other methods for controlling distractions.

Yeah, this is what we call cursive.

> What is the alternative; what do Americans do when writing by hand?

We write the "printer font" or "capital letters" that you mention.

> I still write notes and messages on paper all the time, and I can't imagine bothering to spend twice as long on it.

Firstly, most people don't write on paper that much anymore.

Secondly, this is sort of like when people on hacker news talk about using a tiling window manager like i3.

They can't imagine going back to a regular window manager, they are so much more productive, etc, etc.

But at the end of the day, tiling window managers remain niche because swapping between windows isn't a bottleneck in the workflow of 99.9% of people. They mainly contribute to making someone feel more productive rather than be more productive.

In other words, writing speed isn't a bottleneck in the workflow of 99.9% of people so it just doesn't matter much if we do it inefficiently. If you were a court stenographer required to write by hand or something, then cursive would be a good investment. Otherwise, meh, not much point.

If you forced yourself to write using the "printer font" 100% of the time (we literally call this "printing"), you'd get a lot faster at it. It won't ever be quite as fast as your loop writing / cursive, but the margin would narrow substantially.

I've never experienced this, it has always been harder to read for me and humans already skip over parts of words when reading in print, it's not a cursive phenomenon. That's why you can read through a paragraph of text that has letter jumbled in the middle of words and almost not notice.

> The only reason I would not think this is important is if as a society we agree that with the rise of typing writing itself is not important.

I think that ship sailed over 2 decades ago. In the late 90's I was 8 or 9 years old and it was clear that cursive was a waste of time as I was learning it (and then turning around and teaching my own teachers how to use the computers in the classroom).

There is a balance between speed of writing and legibility, and scripts in a single language tend to just go back and forth on those two over time. Cursive is fairly balanced between them but being moderately biased towards speed. It isn't easier to read for most people, anyway, though not much harder than our other scripts either.

People also love to, and always have, attribute various intellectual or moral virtues to specific scripts! That impulse is similar to dialect, where it has a lot more to do with who uses different scripts, who they are associated with at a given time. In a society dominated by church-educated aristocrats for example, a literate merchant class will attribute sophistication to the ecclesial script and eventually switch to it, etc. It's not hard to extrapolate this pattern to our current time, I don't think.

And then finally users of non-cursive scripts still think and write in terms of units of words, and making this error in your reasoning indicates you probably have the nature of language flipped on its head. The "true" language is the spoken one! Writing systems are just that, systems used to write it down, and the scripts used to make them are even less a part of the language system a person uses to think.

And finally finally our non-cursive script is very close to carolingian miniscule and predates cursive by like centuries. There's not even historical authenticity to cursive superiority. It's fine that you like it more but don't make it an issue of intelligence or virtue because it is neither.

Even with maths, people don't hand calculate large, long, complex equations. We use computers, calculators, and technology to accomplish it with far greater accuracy/reliability and speed. Simple arithmetic is useful to learn to do in your head, but to solve a²+b²=c², you can just google up a Pythagorean calculator. My point is that it's useful to know to find/use the tools to solve problems, not how to to solve by hand. This didn't exist 20 years ago, but it does today, and schools should teach for a modern and future era. It does no good to teach the youth archaic ways of the old which aren't in use anymore. If the parents believe it's important, then it should be taught by the parents to preserve a culture or value they believe in. But schools should spend time to functionally educate.

Cursive is just one of those things that has been replaced by technology, for most it is much faster to type than it is to write, and the advantage cursive has over manuscript is that it was faster. Well, keyboards are faster than cursive, and print is more simple and clean looking in manuscript than cursive on a display using a font.

I worked in a paper-heavy environment where quick and dirty writing was important to adopt in order to get stuff done.

So for me, it's about the only consistent thing in my writing. :)

I'm starting to get embarrassed by my penmanship--I should work on that. Slow=smooth, smooth=fast, as the saying goes.

It's because cursive n has two downstrokes, and cursive m has three downstrokes.

Counting by hills has issues when the letter before it has a high exit. You can end up with barely a hill or no hill at all. Consider oe vs. one (vs. ae), if you're cutting out the 'extra' hill. You can make it work but it gets pretty subtle.

I guess it's functional but less beautiful. Maybe not very traditional.

Ignore cursive at your peril. Its like not learning to do math on paper because we have smartphones.

When I do write anything now I have to write slow and make a conscious effort not to write joined up. That way, it’s actually neat and readable again.

They are interesting and I can see how they would have been hugely important 60 years ago.

And barely anybody will use it outside of the real world. All this does is make kids exasperated with their education because they're being taught something they know is outdated and has no real utility in the real world.

I would say teach them the founding principles of the country but unfortunately those are all written in cursive. Probably better that they can’t read the original so it can be “interpreted” and they learn the double plus good version.

I like when languages have lots of “backward compatibility”

For example Spanish handwriting system hasn’t changed much. Except perhaps it used to use more abbreviations.

A couple of months I went to a museum and was able to read 400 year old Spanish texts, and I can also grab a 200 year old book in Spanish and read it easily. As there have not been major Spelling or writing changes. With French I can even go further back.

This is more difficult in German where older books used to be printed in Fraktur and handwriting starts getting very different in the early 1900s.

I guess this gets more difficult in other languages like Mongolian, Turkish or Romanian which have undergone two or three different alphabet changes.

I really don’t understand why people think that joined up writing isn’t useful any more. Don’t people note things down and want to do it faster that writing out each letter separately?

As a middle stage millennial, we too were once considered retarded. But now we control the media, so it's time to pay it forward.

Seriously though, the article's point about the loss of this skill will result in a knowledge access issue is ridiculous. Anyone who's reading these source materials in cursive should be able to pick it up without too much effort.

For example, "Italic" handwriting has (imho) the advantages of cursive without the excessive strictures.

https://www.italic-handwriting.org/exemplars/display/welling...

Shorthand is much, much faster.

If speed of transcription is your priority, you should learn stenography.

Cursive is an in-between, harder to read than standard writing but slower than stenography.

It can take months to learn but if speed is your priority it is worth it, especially if you don't need it to be readable by anyone else.

Intermediate practitioners can easily reach 250 wpm which is much faster than typical English speech. Skilled practitioners can easily exceed 300 wpm.

Somewhere around 1 in 5 wrote with cursive in my schools (millennial from Appalachia).

It’s pretty weird reading all these other comments about how useless cursive is. Certainly I think it’s more important to type well than to write in cursive. But while the vast majority of my life’s text output has been via computer, I still use handwriting in plenty of places—postcards, birthday cards, thank‐you notes, and so on. Am I just anachronistic

I found it much slower and more cumbersome, and I have not used it since.

Outside of things like law and finance that are deeply stuck in the past, almost nothing requires a signature these days, or if they do you can just kinda scribble something that vaguely has shapes of letters in it. I learned cursive, but I'm definitely not writing proper lettering if I'm signing a check or some contract.

I have personally dropped using cursive around 2004, because I was not able to read anything after myself.

I think over 18 years of education it's reasonable to teach kids both forms of writing.

There is no lack of curriculum space.

Most things we learn we forget. Writing is one of those neat thing we keep forever.

And bad handwriting is a problem that transcends font.

Handwriting in general, however, maintains merit.

"This is the letter "m", that's how it looks like, write it here in this line 1000 times in this pattern".

Something like this: http://bystredziecko.pl/karty-pracy/nauka-pisania/5/szlaczki...

I already could read books by then, but most kids didn't, so they learnt cursive first.

BTW cursive isn't any less or more readable than printed letters by itself. It depends on how fast you write. Printed letters force you to go slower, so by default you write them clearer. But if you go slow with cursive it will be as clear as printed letters.