My daughter recently reviewed the various academic programs available at the Hill Country elementary school which Wee Jamie will eventually attend, when she makes her pile in real estate and moves up to that community. Among the skills on offer is training in writing cursive – which we were both pretty thrilled to hear about. (Although I do hold out for home-schooling Wee Jamie.) Apparently, teaching cursive handwriting has been pretty much phased out in elementary school curriculums of late – in favor of either printing or keyboarding… apparently, very few people now hand-write documents. Scrawling a signature is about as far as most people go, these days of computers, cellphones, email and being able to fill out forms on-line.
For myself, I have perfectly awful handwriting; not all the cursive practice in third and fourth grade could remedy this quality a single iota. Frankly, I envy anyone who has excellent flowing Palmer-style handwriting, or the gentleman I met at an art show who could do perfect gothic script lettering – freehand. I have usually resorted to printing, if legibility to another person was a requirement, and there wasn’t a typewriter or computer handy. But I fully support Wee Jamie being taught to write cursive, for the very excellent reason that even if you can’t handwrite legibly – you can still read handwritten documents. Otherwise, whole libraries and archives are closed to someone who simply can’t read such documents.
Some years ago, I made a tidy amount for a local researcher, who in the course of his studies, been able to access the letter archives of a prominent early 19th century inventor/industrialist, preserved in the archives of a major East Coast university. There were pages and pages of PDF scans of personal letters and business correspondence – not just of the industrialist himself, but from his wife and son, in-laws, friends and business associates. The researcher didn’t have time to read and transcribe the whole archive himself, so he hired me to do it … and it was rather fun, as well as remunerative. There was a wide range in quality of the handwriting, too – some of the business letters were as easily read as if they were typewritten; rather obviously, the industrialist hired men who could write with a clear and elegant hand. His mother-in-law, alas, wrote with a scrawl nearly as illegible as my own. His wife had the habit of saving paper by turning the page 45 degrees and writing more lines crossways over what had already been written – which was even more challenging to read when the ink bled through to the other side of what was obviously very thin paper. The industrialists’ father-in-law would have been schooled in the late 18th century, as he routinely used the then-archaic formulation of the letter ‘f’ instead of the rounded ‘s’ in his letters. (This meant confusion in deciphering his letters until I figured it out. I got rather fond of the father-in-law through his letters although he was about 150 years dead by then. He was a decent and kindly old stick, charitable and modest, although his son-in-law was one of the richest men in America at the time.)
Anyway – being able to read original old documents can be a very useful skill, especially for someone with an interest in history and culture. I have read that in countries like Japan, there have been so many simplifications and variations of the alphabet in use over the recent decades that many ancient documents can only be read by specialist scholars. It would be a pity if the same happened here in the US. Perhaps the urge to move away from teaching cursive is a deliberate ploy; a means to sever younger generations from our founding documents and our history.
Anyway, I got to think about skills that are commonly seen as outdated, outmoded, superseded by new technologies … but maybe, just maybe … really aren’t. The ability to drive a stick shift automobile or truck. Morse code. Celestial navigation. Editing audio tape with a razor blade and specialty sticky-tape. Hand sewing – didn’t Doctor Kennedy mention once that the skills of doctors doing sutures had fallen off because so few people did hand sewing any more? Discuss as you wish; what other seemingly-outdated skills are still useful or may become useful again in our lamentably chaotic world?
Ethnically I am a mixture of Chinese and a good hunk of northern Europe. And my handwriting looks like it. In the ancient days when I was in elementary school, we had “Penmanship” classes as part of the curriculum K-6. I regularly got “F”‘s.
When I was about 25, my dad came out to visit. He mentioned in passing that I was born left-handed. So like all good parents in those primordial days, they made me quit using my left hand and made me right-handed. It was early enough in my life that I had no memory of ever using my left hand. We did have a discussion about all the lectures I got about that “Penmanship” grade. My son, by the way, is left-handed and other than a funny slant his handwriting is perfectly legible.
I have a feeling that we are going to lose and possibly have to regain a bunch of old skills in a lot of fields. Not because of “progress”, but because of societal regression. Consider that everybody, including YHS, pretty much uses some form of computer [be it desktop, laptop, or phone] for bloody near everything. That is absolutely dependent on a really complex infrastructure, at its base being reliable electric power.
About a month ago we had a blizzard here. 2 feet of snow and high winds for 24 hours. And as a consequence over a good part of the state we lost electricity for just under 48 hours. Now ponder where that leaves everyone not only as far as online communication, but also lights, heat, refrigeration, etc.
There are a lot of choke points for services and utilities. Best be as ready as you can be with workarounds. And do not just assume that Big Brother will save you. He might, if he can or if he wants to, but you cannot depend on it.
Subotai Bahadur
I’m right-handed, SB, so I don’t even have that excuse. All I could think of when they were trying to teach me good penmanship in grade school was that I was thinking too fast for my hand to write…
An observation from substitute teaching: cursive practice gives students a good break in the day , where they can let their mind roam freely without any teacher reprimands. Your body can be on task, but not your mind, but that doesn’t bother the teacher during cursive practice.
I would suspect that on an exam, one could write faster in cursive than if one printed. Which would indicate that cursive isn’t as unnecessary as some believe.
My elementary school teachers CONTINUALLY- or at least so it seemed to me- harped on my bad handwriting. High school, not as much, though one teacher wrote on an exam paper that I might have gotten a higher grade had he been able to comprehend more of what I wrote.
As an adult my handwriting isn’t that bad. At least once I got complimented on my handwriting.
I stuttered in my early elementary years, bad enough to have some speech therapist sessions. When stuttering resumed in junior high because of a battle-ax teacher, I needed to deal with it again. I learned that if I slowed down what I was going to say, stuttering slowed down or stopped. (The only time that battle ax teacher got a laugh out of me was when she said that the first course I needed to take in high school was typing! In retrospect she wasn’t that bad.)
I suspect that there was a connection between stuttering and bad handwriting. Stuttering- what I wanted to say coming out faster than my speech capabilities could handle. Slowing down helped. Bad handwriting- what I wanted to write came out too fast for my still-immature motor skills to deal with. As I matured, my motor skills and what I wanted to write were more in tandem: thus better handwriting.
My cursive handwriting includes some printed letters.
Hand sewing- not that obsolete. For decades I have sewn buttons back on shirts. I let my to-do pile of button-deficient shirts get too large. When my sister recently visited, she asked what she could do to help. Buttons on shirts. I then had seven shirts available for use.
Ironic that manual typewriters are now obsolete, but typing skills are much more widely used. Typing is no longer just for the nonacademically inclined girls to learn so that they can become secretaries.
Changing oil in one’s car is something that one could easily do oneself. Nowadays oil changes need a jack. Getting under a jacked up car is a step too far for me. On the other hand, with the advent of YouTube and the Internet, there is much more advice for shade tree mechanics available than there used to be. I have used YouTube to fix a number of auto issues that the “Check Engine Light” has pointed out. If the first “quick and dirty” solution works – such as adding lacquer fluid for a catalytic converter issue- that’s fine.
If YouTube points instead to 3-5 complex repairs-no easy ones- I take it to the shop. For one issue, it turned out the shop had the same issue, as the shop had to do three-four different things to solve the problem. Just like YouTube said! (This is a garage with a very good local reputation that I first started using 20 years ago, so I don’t fault the garage..)
Having read the above comments, I would add that I was right handed, so I can’t blame the school for forcing a left hander to write with his right hand. Like Sgt. Mom says, thinking too fast for my hands to write. Though coincidentally, I am close to being ambidextrous. When I was a toddler, my parents placed me on the floor with a bunch of objects to pick up. I forget the precise ratio, but let’s say I had a 60-40 right over left preference. I use ford AND spoon with my left hand.
Generally, I see _writing_ cursive as a skill wasted on most people with Y chromosomes. Or writing _good_ cursive.
However, being able to _read_ cursive as just another font is useful.
My handwriting in cursive has always been terrible. As a lefty I was never taught how to write in this right-handed world, and it looks terrible. My mother was a secretary for the head of drafting of a large company back in the 40’s and has cursive that looks like it came from a machine. She’d see mine and just sigh.
In engineering school I learned to take very fast notes using printing, but almost no one else could read them. I had no trouble reading my own scribbles, but that worked out okay. In my first engineering job out of school I did a LOT of hand-drafting (drafting machines) and hand-lettering, which came out very clear since I wasn’t under the terrible time pressure of transcribing somebody else’s speaking.
I just wrote a pile of notes for something coming up soon, and my wife was trying to read them. She basically gave up and handed them back to me…I could read them with no problem, but I could see where somebody else might have a problem.
Just like being able to make change, writing and reading cursive is going to be a dying art. Until everything falls apart.
Another archaic skill: they dropped sentence diagramming but I had one grade school teacher who still taught it to us anyway.
Sgt. Mom talking about the slantwise writing is a reminder that back in the day, everything to do with writing was expensive. Paper of any sort was expensive, especially good paper. Many places, away from the longest settled areas, might have paper available only sporadically and you bought it by the page. Postage was expensive when a penny had real value and many people might only see a post office a few times a year, no Rural Free Delivery. Steel nibs and ink or pencils cost real money too.
None of this probably applied to the wife, some people were and are just thrifty by nature or experience.
My Latin teacher told about her graduate work translating some 1st century Roman texts. There are literally tons of these sitting in various institutions waiting for someone to be the first person in millennia to look at them. Back then, they used neither punctuation nor white space to delineate words or sentences with the invention of the paragraph still centuries in the future.
Writing left-handed is just as natural and easy as right-handed, provided you tilt the paper parallel to the forearm of your writing hand. No “funny slants.” (Look in a mirror at someone writing with their right hand.)
I won that battle with a stupid second-grade teacher, though it required my lawyer father’s intervention. He was so annoyed by the teacher’s ignorance and intransigence that he ran for the school board and won.
Ha! Easy one: Right-handed individuals firing shoulder weapons from the right shoulder. This canard (sic) came to be because for most individuals the greater DEXTERITY (sic) of the right hand had been needed to MANIPULATE (sic) the archaic ignition systems of early firearms. Firearms ignition technology moved on, but the “dead hand of the past” kept most of us firing from the right side, thereby supporting the weapon on the weaker side.
I work in the Department of Geography at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. I am routinely asked to “translate” 19th-century handwritten documents. I really loved reading the reports by Claude Conder and Lt. (later Lord) Kitchener on the Survey of Western Palestine (and their maps published in 1880 were exquisite). Kitchener in particular had very clear handwriting, as did most of the government secretaries of that time in Britain. Reading these documents you can also guess at their emotional state or level of fatigue. Great fun for me.
I have to add that I was very pleased when my 13-year-old granddaughter asked me to teach her cursive — English, that is, because Hebrew cursive is quite different.
Regarding Japan, the 11th Century novel “Tale of Genji” is the only surviving literary work of its time, in large part because at the time men vied for writing with the most fanciful handwriting of the kanji. Women were not thought capable of using kanji, so they were not taught them, and Lady Murasaki wrote in kana, which are much easier to read (not that it was easy, as it had to be translated to modern Japanese in the early 20th Century).
I had the combined blessing & curse of educated parents, one who taught in a very high end and strenuously academic private school and, as a result, I began structured education two years ahead of my peers, a condition that persisted until matriculation. As for handedness, I am firmly right-handed, but until about five I favored neither, which has led to a certain degree of ambidexterousness that has proved useful over the years; I experienced Ms. Post’s mandates at an early age, and still occasionally operate a fork southpaw since that’s where it is positioned, most convenient to my left hand. The same occurs with any number of tools, and right-hand drive cars are a pleasant interlude, although even in Britishland they have almost entirely succumbed to the ubiquitous awfulmagic trashmission in place of a tightly gated manual, making the left hand, save for the heater and radio, a nearly useless appendage.
Part of that early school deal came with very early reading, math and….cursive writing, to the point that printing was actively discouraged, and penmanship heavily stressed. By fourth grade it was impressed upon us that a proper wet-nib pen and quality ink were critical components, and that Christmas I was gifted with a fairly good fountain pen.
It was also impressed upon us at that age that ball point pens, then only recently of sufficient development to be of commercial success and personal utility, were a scourge to be avoided, as stiffness of the ball forced applying more pressure, whereas a wet-nib pen floated across the page on a film of glorious blue-black Schaeffer’s ink. I found fountain pens easy and comfortable to use, and still have several, although for decades applying letters to a page has been almost entirely electronic, with only humble grocery lists remanded to graphite (in my defense, long years in various engineering positions demanded “standard hand printing” as part of specifications, production drawings and operational instructions, so my grocery lists are highly legible works of art).
I attempted to introduce my offspring to the joys of fountain pens and the penmanship benefit they offered, but to no avail; keyboards and Bic scribbles became the default. That today’s youth “cannot read cursive” – a stunning revelation from a witness in the Zimmerman trial but quite widespread among the young – has led to the semi-humourous observation that cursive writing and the manual transmission are now Secret Codes of High Order condemning the youthful to ageist-driven purgatory. Indeed, issuing even the most mundane document in cursive is nearly certain to engender illiteracy and provoke instant disdain.
The handwritten notes of yesteryear, deeply thoughtful and composed in flowing wet-ink cursive stamped, mailed, and patiently awaited, have long since given way to the urgency of email and texting, with both language and civility suffering as a result. It is so rare today to see anything handwritten in cursive it has become a novelty, and Meisterstucks et al are museum pieces. We unreformed Practitioners of the Ancient Art should form a secret society to advance the cause of cursive writing, lest it be entirely lost to history.
In addition to cursive — mine is excellent, due to having learnt “Library Hand” from my mother [a librarian for 70 years (!)] and having, by perhaps Grade 5, hybridised it with the Palmer taught in school — I would suggest some or most of following practical skills:
Navigation by map and compass; basic knots; basic first aid; clothing repair, including by hand; building an outdoor fire from scratch with only a knife and matches available and boiling water on it [think after a bad storm]; etc. The best place for your kids to learn these is *Boy* Scouts, as the Girl Scouts/Guides are quite hopeless. Then have *them* teach you. It will solidify their knowledge, build genuine self-esteem, and solidify your relationship in ways you cannot yet imagine.
On a more intellectual level … learn traditional maths [long division, etc]; use proper grammar; learn basic logic and what used to be called ‘rhetoric’ [the ability to present a rational defence of your beliefs and positions]; learn and understand key logical and linguistic differences, for example Precision vs Accuracy, Correlation vs Causality, Implication vs Inference, Observation vs Interpretation, and so on; Basic probability and statistics, and how people intentionally lie with numbers.
Know how your governments work, both in theory and in practice.
Know that there *are* cycles, and know roughly where in them you are, be they your individual life cycle — at 24, don’t try to live like your parents at 54 — or much larger geopolitical and economic cycles.
Finally, therefore, learn how to live prudently, spending less than you make, and avoiding all debt except that which is self-liquidating. Pay as you go, and you’ll go a LOT farther, since debt is a claim on future income. Specifically, understand that a house is a LIABILITY, not an asset. As a place to live, a house is worth about 100x the monthly rent of equivalent housing. Anything beyond that is speculative hope and the belief that you can later find a bigger fool to pay more.
in favor of either printing or keyboarding
Funny thing is, back in the day, we learned all three. Except “keyboarding” was called “typing.”
Perhaps the urge to move away from teaching cursive is a deliberate ploy
I don’t think it’s as much that as simply Year Zero thinking. “That’s old stuff. We don’t need that anymore because we’re the new generation and are better than all you old fogies.” (Mind you, it’s the older young folks saying this, ignoring they will soon be the ones discarded by the children they’re raising.)
All of those discarded skills are going to be important sometime in the next 2 generations, as civilization finally realizes its foundation is missing and comes crumbling down.
Take a look at The Knowledge, by Lewis Dartnell, for a bunch of things (not really skills, but foundational aspects of the hardware of civilization) most preppers have never thought of.
Frank
April 4, 2024 at 7:27 pm
sentence diagramming
Yes, dropped because it was “too hard” and “archaic.” Yet it really helps one to much more easily grasp complex sentences (sometimes even with complex thoughts in them!) and make sure you’re not misunderstanding things. Which brings us to grammar and punctuation… /eyeroll/
It is said that the ultimate anti-theft device is a manual transmission
I wonder what Matthew Crawford, of “Shop Class as Soulcraft”, would say about cursive writing or sewing. In his “Why We Drive”, Crawford discusses the implications of modern car design which insulate the driver from the road through cockpit design. Cursive writing provides a feel or a connection to the paper that printing doesn’t provide
Gringo – It appears to me that we had similar experiences in childhood. I spent my K-8 years in speech therapy classes, though not for stuttering, and a number of years in various special education therapies for learning disabilities. I wonder about those pathologies and some current neurological developments. I should also add that my handwriting was so abysmal that I was the first in my high school English class to use a word processor because my teacher said my penmanship drove him to drink.
Regarding diagramming sentences. My 7th grade diagramming skills were very helpful in understanding syntax of programming languages and writing interpreters and figuring out compilers. Recently, I’ve called on diagramming to help me learn Homeric Greek — that language doesn’t rely on position much, so I need help in connecting up meaning with conjugations and declensions. Welp!
Once a Judge asked me to write out the settlement agreement my client had reached with the opposition. Upon presentation to the Judge, he asked me (in open court) how many years had I spent in medical school!
Several comments:
– I am a lifelong leftie, one who ‘stubbornly’ resisted all attempts to force me to use my right hand for tasks. (We aren’t truly stubborn by nature, it’s just that we get so much opposition to our handedness). If I had a dollar for every time someone commented on how awkward I looked doing manual tasks, I could rival Elon Musk!
– The ‘old-style’ skills are important to keep around. It would be a good thing to have a tradition of a family or neighborhood level of “Let’s live without modern conveniences for a week” – I am willing to excuse the modern toilet and faucet, let’s not go crazy. But this might prompt younger people to look into the less electricity/electronics dependent technologies.
– Ham Radio is THE technology that needs to be kept alive. It permits communication in time of war or disaster, and allows users to bypass official government permissions to spread news. It can be operated on very small wattage (called QRP), and Morse code (called CW by hams) has many of the same advantages as text messaging:
—> It gets through when the signal is not strong enough to permit a clear voice message
—> It is unaffected by the accent or speech ability of the participants
—> It can be operated by those disabled, blind, or even deaf. I am currently learning CW (check out http://cwops.org for information about online classes), and am able, despite my hearing loss, to use adaptations to manage it.
– At the very least, buy a set of GMRS radios (Midland brand is good). They won’t send or receive very far, but will allow you to be in contact with neighbors, should the streets become unruly.
—> If I had one suggestion, buy some large storage batteries and some solar panels. Learn to hook them up BEFORE any disaster that requires them. (That’s why ham operators are always practicing – you need to be adept with the technology BEFORE you need it). Find out which necessary home appliances/tools will work with that method, which won’t (and what you might replace them with), and what the power drains would be. If, like me, you live in an often cloudy area, what effect will that have on your ability to provide electricity.
Am I a Prepper? Not really. I have some modest supplies/tools set aside, but that’s mostly because I’ve been in weather-related situations before. I just don’t like depending on government for my needs.
Don’t forget http://arrl.org – it’s the best source of info about ham radio around.
My cursive was never that good, but it was legible. But I learned to type in high school, and it’s been the keyboard ever since. And sixty-five years of keyboarding can definitely wreak havoc on your cursive. I can still read cursive, though — and am familiar enough with it to sneer at those computer-printed fonts that try to fool me into thinking I’ve gotten a personal, hand-written letter from a politician.
I learned cursive under the watchful and highly critical eye of a Catholic school nun so my handwriting is pretty good.
I do lament the lack of cursive skills in younger folks – how will they ever be able to read their great-grandparents’ love letters? It’s much the same with immigrant families who no longer speak their ancestors’ language; I used to do a lot of Swedish to English translations of old letters for people who did not know any Swedish anymore. It would just light up their faces to hear what their mormor or farmor had written, like a door being opened.
Of late I’ve been translating 19th century genealogical documents from East Prussia, all written in the old German script that even younger Germans (born after WWII) cannot read. I came across a reprint of an old handwriting textbook and taught myself the script so that I could then read it more easily. Of course, readability depends heavily on how skilled the original writer was, and some of them were really awful.
Bart Hall, Unrepentant Jayhawker:
Bravo for so complete a syllabus, and not one superfluous part. (That’s from someone that cannot stand writing in cursive, or reading it, either. I’m a big fan, and a lousy practitioner, of Getty-Dubay italic.)
The basic bushcraft skills in your para. 2 have been lost to so many people, yet they’re useful, and not merely in emergencies. Mental and pencil-and-paper arithmetic, and an understanding of those logical distinctions you list have always been vital BS filters – and in the world we see emerging, they’ll be more important, not less. Basic civics is poorly understood too, which weakens citizenship. (I’m Canadian, and it’s even worse here, because a portion of people assume our system is, or ought to be, a carbon-copy of the US.)
The good old Trivium (grammar, logic, rhetoric…and always in that order) isn’t even a school subject any more, and that brings to mind an encounter I had with one of my old profs. (Background: I am a geologist, but worked for a while as a mining reporter on a business newspaper.) He said he thought that high-school English should be a prerequisite for a specialist degree in geological science. It didn’t come to me at the time, but the esprit d’escalier kicked in a few hours later. High school English had done precisely nothing for my ability to write clearly. Latin, French, and the great writing coaches – Strunk, Fowler, and Gowers – had done much more. There’s a common falsehood that learning literary analysis and criticism somehow teaches you to write simply, clearly, and to effect. Rubbish: it’s the Trivium that does that.
To map, compass, and celestial navigation, let me add the relationship between time and the heavens. Many people have no clue it exists, let alone how it works.
To mental math, I’ll add the venerable slide rule. I was in high school when the first four-banger calculators hit the mass market – $100 in the money of the early disco era. Nothin’ doin’: I could afford a $2.95 plastic Sterling slide rule, which got me through high school…and after that, through more than one exam that dead batteries might have turned into a rout. (For our 25th anniversary, my wife got me a Pickett aerial photography slide rule. I found it romantic; YMMV.)
One last marker: I cried when I traded in my last manual-transmission pickup.
An important aside about handwriting – I believe it uses a different style of thinking than typing, and requires more “slow” thinking, as you form the letters on the page. If Marshall McLuhan was correct about the medium and the message, then perhaps the medium is more important than we thought.
One other note: when cursive was taught in earlier days, often the correct handgrip for the pen or pencil, the correct way to sit at the desk, and the correct way to position one’s notebook were gone over for some time before the lettering even began.
Cursive should have been de-emphasised years ago. Being able to do it is fine. Having it be attractive, or anything more than simply legible, is a waste of time. And it annoys the pig, as they say. Making it equal to reading, arithmetic, or even “extras” like music or art is foolishness.
I had serious motor control issues as a child. My parents were told I could never write with a pen or pencil, and to get me a typewriter instead. (I was fully literate at four.)
And indeed, to this day, I can’t “write” in cursive. I learned to draw letters and words, but it’s a different mental function. I can’t take notes or transcribe speech, because my attention must be focused on the pen while I draw the letters.
BTW, it occurs to me that if the skill of cursive writing is lost, the skill of handwriting analysis goes away too.
I must admit that I am one of the few who writes well, and can freehand most calligraphy styles at will. Cursive was enjoyable and I didn’t stress about practicing it. However, on my way to my degree in Occupational Therapy, and eventually a professional doctorate, I learned that the development process between the large part of the brain that runs the hand and the muscles and nerves used to write, are facilitated through cursive techniques in a way that printing cannot do. Many school curricula are responding to the research and reinstituting cursive methods into their curriculum for third grade to leverage this developmental approach. So maybe cursive won’t be lost to students after all.
Jim Whyte
High school English had done precisely nothing for my ability to write clearly…There’s a common falsehood that learning literary analysis and criticism somehow teaches you to write simply, clearly, and to effect. Rubbish: it’s the Trivium that does that.
Unfortunately, my high school was heavy on literary analysis and criticism as the approach to teach writing. I abhorred the Junior Literary Critic approach, as did my sister. As she said, the Junior Literary Critic ended up writing stuff that was fake, that wasn’t really about what you knew. The Junior Literary Critic invented symbols and such because that is what the teacher was looking for, not because the Junior Literary Critic actually perceived them.
As a result of being forced into the Junior Literary Critic mode, I developed an aversion to writing. The only two times I enjoyed my high school English classes was when we were told to spend the class period writing on a topic far removed from literary criticism.
Decades later, a friend told me that our high school still took the Junior Literary Critic approach. Guess what- his son hated it as much as I did.