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Should cursive still be taught in schools?
Remember getting your pen licence? That enshrined document among Australia’s school-going youth, marking the rite of passage from cheap scribbler to noble, professional scribe. Those endless hours spent painstakingly connecting one letter to another, sewing the alphabet into seamless elegance, seemed finally worth it.
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As an admirer of beautiful calligraphy and cursive (and other) handwriting, I can appreciate the arguments for cursive handwriting’s retention, but, as a constant user of digital technologies, I can also see the redundancy of such “archaic” writing styles… especially when one considers that the vast majority of handwriting is not of the most legible nature, often to say the least, with doctors’ prescriptions attesting to this. But, with the handwritten examinations going to persist for sometime, until examiners catching up with the digital realm, so it is advisable that some level of legibility in handwriting is acquired in the early school years.
To this end, the italic hand advocated by Gunnlaugur SE Briem of Iceland (see: briem.net/ ) has tremendous benefit as it can be very fast and very legible, which when considering the use of handwriting on digital platforms that is converted to digitally editable text, the error rate in the conversion would be considerably lower than from that of cursive handwriting.
* NOTE: no connection to Gunnlaugur SE Briem… just a long term admirer of this style of handwriting in an attempt at improving my own 🙂