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posted by
cmn32480
on Wednesday November 02 2016, @08:33AM
from the heading-for-a-new-dark-age dept.
from the heading-for-a-new-dark-age dept.
The New Yorker wonders:
My children know how to print their letters. And they type frighteningly well. Still, I can't escape the conviction that cursive—writing it and knowing how to read it—represents some universal value. I'm not the only one who thinks so. Every year, there are worried articles about the decline of cursive and its omission from school curricula. And there's a backlash, one that I secretly cheer for. When I read that Washington state is now considering Senate Bill 6469, "an act related to requiring that cursive writing be taught in common schools," I gave a little fist pump in the air.
Cursive and handwriting are dead. Communication of the future will be done with pure emoticons.
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Life is to you a dashing and bold adventure.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday November 02 2016, @06:12PM
You can find examples of the exact same fallacious reasoning that you are referring to being satirized in Chaucer. It attacks the bullshit-detector problem from the "those who forget history are doomed to repeat it" angle.
(Score: 2) by TheLink on Thursday November 03 2016, @01:43PM
You can find examples of the exact same fallacious reasoning that you are referring to being satirized in Chaucer.
Arguments that it's in Chaucer and Twain is about as silly as saying that it's there in "Little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf" and "Three Little Pigs" or "The Bible". Yeah some students of "Little Red Riding Hood" etc might learn the necessary skills using those as a starting point, but most people clearly don't.
It attacks the bullshit-detector problem from the "those who forget history are doomed to repeat it" angle.
And it doesn't do a good job of training people to detect bullshit. Practically ALL the English Literature _teachers_ I know are forwarding bullshit and don't seem to be able to tell. As far as I can see learning English Literature does not teach most people the skills I mentioned. It's not really part of the main goals nor part of the tests/exams given to students. In fact some of the modern courses seem more likely to condition the students into falling for bullshit than rejecting it. It's like the difference between learning to dance vs learning to fight - many of the same "muscles" are being trained but the goals and focus are different.
Thus to me it needs to be a separate core subject with its own goals and objectives.