Education officials in Indiana announced last week that schools there are no longer required to teach cursive handwriting. Instead, school children will be taught keyboard skills. Indiana is on the cutting edge here, but they won't be the last. Cursive is doomed.
It's kind of a shame, really. Learning to write cursive has always been a rite of passage. I remember looking forward to it very much. The summer before third grade, which is when cursive was taught, I spent an entire afternoon sitting at the kitchen table with paper and pencil making up what I thought cursive capital letters would look like. I came close on some of the more obvious ones like B and U and M, but my mother said that the one that I made up for I was actually quite close to the cursive L. That tickled me.
I had a cousin quite a bit younger than I who, at about age six or seven, loved to watch people write cursive. He would say, "Write writing for me," and he'd sit close and watch fascinated as the words flowed across the page. It didn't matter what the words were, since he couldn't read it anyway.
Future generations who are unable to write writing will not be able to read it either, of course, but that will create jobs -- there will be a need for experts who can interpret hand-written documents.
Some people worry that it will be too easy to forge signatures if people simply print their names, but really, it won't be long before we are determining identification from thumbprints or eyeball scans or maybe even instant DNA analysis of saliva.
Eeewww. I hope asking a celebrity for an autograph won't be replaced by being spat upon.
No comments:
Post a Comment