Why Cursive Is Still a Valuable Writing Tool
David Molloy's Do we need to teach children joined-up handwriting? is a good review of the issues swirling around many school systems' decisions to stop teaching cursive or, as Molloy calls it, "joined up handwriting."
As I pointed out in Why I Still Use Cursive I'm a big fan and user of cursive writing. As much as I value cursive, though, I think the real question should be whether -- and how -- to teach students to write.
By "write" I mean physically creating words, sentences, complete paragraphs, and even stories. Sure you can do this with a keyboard. But I believe that there is a more complete integration of thinking and writing when you lay out the words directly and physically on a page with a pen or pencil. After all, you can't just backspace over things written down on paper. You have to think a bit more about what you are saying.
I'm not suggesting you should not teach typing (even though typing itself may go away eventually as speech recognition software improves).
But I suspect there will continue to be more value to learning cursive than just being able to "write pretty."
Copyright (c) 2017 by Dennis D. McDonald.
