Today my sister shared link to an article about the decline of teaching of cursive handwriting in schools.
I have mixed emotions on this:
On the one hand, cursive is not nearly as useful as it once was, in that we have far more efficient means of recording language at our disposal. To say that students will not be able to read the Declaration of Independence seems to ignore other issues, such as the fact that cursive itself has evolved with time (we no longer write a lower case s to resemble a cursive f, and my mother learned to write lower case t differently than I did just a few decades later). English itself has evolved. Pronunciation, spelling, & meaning of selected words have changed with time. There are probably many things that we no longer teach children that our ancestors considered vitally important. Personally, while I find the proper use of language important, I find the ability to communicate thoughts and ideas to be far more important. If I could trade the loss of cursive for increased proficiency in English as I see it used on Twitter & Facebook & text messages, I would do it in a millisecond.
On the other hand, learning cursive was a rite of passage, and it is sad that something so meaningful and familiar from my youth is going the way of the Dodo bird.
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