Among the unappealing junk and bills in my mailbox recently, there was one cheery standout. The card, addressed to my daughter, was a ‘thank-you’ for her work as a flower girl in a recent wedding.
Ripping apart the envelope with relish, my girl abruptly deflated: “Mommy, I can’t read it. It’s in cursive.”
It’s an increasingly common phenomenon, accelerated by the fact that the new Common Core educational standards do not include cursive instruction.
Like most adults, I spent grade school painstakingly polishing that weird lowercase ‘b’ and uppercase ‘G’. I rarely use my cursive as an adult. On the rare instances that I don’t type a correspondence – thanks to email and social media – I use block letters.
This, however, was the first time I realized that my children will probably be incapable of reading something in cursive. Rebecca A. Silva, a third-grade teacher from Rhode Island, expands on the topic of the cursive-illiterate: “I think there’s a concern that kids can’t access history. Without teaching them cursive, you’re denying them that access.”
Jimmy Bryant, the director of archives and special collections at the University of Central Arkansas, worries more about the demise of an American art form: “As an archivist, I see many beautiful letters that were written in cursive. At one time in our history people took great pains to write a letter utilizing their best penmanship. In fact, a case could be made that some of the finer examples of cursive writing are actually a form of art. We need to teach cursive to school children to preserve this history.”
Still, cursive isn’t dead just yet, and at least seven of the states that adopted the Common Core standards are fighting to keep it alive in schools.
via How the Common Core Kills Cursive – Schools – Woodstock-Towne Lake, GA Patch.
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