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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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Anyone can make an omelet with eggs. The trick is to make one with none.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Thursday November 03 2016, @06:19AM
I'm late to the party, so I don't know how many will read this. But I find the article and this whole discussion incredibly ironic. We're all debating whether we should focus on better practical "business" skills -- but that's what cursive was!!
Seriously -- the New Yorker article talks about some moral virtue of penmanship. Yeah, Spencer and Palmer and other wackadoos believed that -- but their methods became popular as a way for the lower classes to find decent work. See, back in the dirty old days of the 19th century, you could work on a farm (and break you back) or work in a factory (and get your fingers cut off), and other miscellaneous jobs that today we'd consider either "hard labor" or "dangerous" or both.
Being a scrivener was a way for somebody who was skirting the lower edges of middle class respectability to do something that wouldn't wreck his body and maybe even lead to a position as an office clerk or something even better.
But to do that, you needed to write. And read. Literacy was starting to gradually improve significantly, but writing is hard work too.
Rich people went to schools where they were taught penmanship. (And they were taught in various inconsistent regional styles -- frequently the way you wrote certain letters even told something about your social level. It's declining -- if it even still exists today -- but I have friends who went to fancy prep schools a few decades back and still were taught distinctive non-Palmerian ways to write script... that's what set you apart from those ruffians laboring away with their Spencer and Palmer correspondence course primers.)
Anyhow, what folks like Spencer and Palmer did was to standardize a script and offer it to the masses, so they could climb the social ladder with their useful writing skills. It also benefitted employers to have a more standard script.
But the whole point of cursive was to teach a business skill to folks who wanted to succeed in the practical world. There was some artistry too it, too, but mostly the concern for your average guy learning Spencerian script was to write legibly enough to get a job. These scripts were designed for the tools of the day too -- try writing with a 19th-century style pen, and you'll see how your ink blots all over the place if you try to print.
So, it's incredibly ironic that most of the pro-cursive folks today are essentially arguing for something esoteric just "because." That's NEVER what good handwriting was about before the past couple generations. If you go back a few centuries, rich people didn't necessarily have good handwriting either (though they often did, because they were well-tutored) -- but if they needed something done, they had hired scribes to make it even more pretty.
I don't get the whole pro-cursive argument. It's incredibly pointless these days.
(By the way, I say this as someone who was so scarred by getting a poor penmanship grade in 1st or 2nd grade that I devoted myself to improving it. Not only did I master the Palmer-variant taught by my school, but I actually enjoy doing a little Spencer on the weekends with a decent wide-nibbed fountain pen. I can do a passable Copperplate, but I've never really devoted the time. I don't want to be a calligrapher, after all... it's just fun. I also tend to work with old historical documents and can even decipher some old Italian secretarial hands and date them reasonably well... though the old German handwriting from the 17th century is a pain. So yeah, I know a hell of a lot more about handwriting than the yahoo who wrote this New Yorker piece, and *I* think the pro-cursive argument is bogus!)