Cursive Writing

Cursive Writing

 

I don't get it. The question has come up about whether or not our children should learn cursive writing. Can you believe that somebody actually asked that question? I don't know who dunnit, but I suspect it musta been the same people what invented the new way of doin' arithmetic. There's probably a committee somewheres what thinks up ways to make children dumber an' more unskilled than they ever was before. Well it ain't calligraphy, but it's as close as we're gonna get without special trainin'.

I can still remember learnin' to write that way in grade three at school. I even remember the teacher's name. It was Miss Sneddon. Anyways that was the way big people wrote an' it was cool to be able to write like big people. What I don't remember is anybody bellyachin' about it. What did disgruntle us though was that the girls all had beautiful flowing handwriting while only a few o' the boys did.

Well now lets put this into a real context. I'd like to know who's gonna read all the documents and archives that are made in cursive writing if ya don't know how to do it yer own self. I suppose in a few years when all us old timers are on the other side o' the grass, it'll fall into the realm of archaeologists. Right now we got a copy o' the Magna Carta travellin' around Canada. Who's gonna be able to read that? An who's gonna train prospective doctors to write out their gobbledy-gook prescriptions or the pharmacists to read 'em? Or what do we do if there's a power outage an' we can't use our I pads or computers no more? Think about that!

There was a time when letter writing was a nice thing to do. Handwritten letters was nice to give an' even better to receive. You could tell who they was from just by lookin' at writin' on the envelope. Winston Churchill used to write to his wife every day, even if they was in the same house. It was his way of expressing himself that could be done in no other way. So you see, there's a certain romanticism in cursive writing that can't be duplicated.

The trouble is, we keep lowering the expectations we have of our children. It escapes our adult imagination that they have a tremendous capacity for learning. An they have an appetite for it too!  If we continue screwin' down the capacity for book learnin', someday archaeologists will identify the time in our evolution that our human brains began to shrink. At least that's how it seems to me from up here on the top shelf.

Just sayin'.