With the introduction of SB 73, Sen. Leising keeps up her fight to mandate cursive for elementary schools. Generally, I think educators and not the Indiana General Assembly should tend to the details of required school curriculum. On a personal level, as I’ve noted before, I’m very open to the idea that — given that instructional time is not infinite — schools might prioritize subjects other than cursive. Cursive writing is an anachronism. I have seen people arguing the mental benefits of writing over keyboarding, but I don’t think I’ve seen much in the way of advocacy separating out benefits from cursive that one does not also get from printing.
Mainly — I’ll confess — my bad attitude comes from the fact that I always hated writing in cursive, do not believe it has improved my life in any substantial way, and I stopped doing it as soon as I was permitted.
My entry from last year:
Sen. Leising has been tilting at this particular windmill for years since the State Board of Education made cursive discretionary for schools to teach. Advocates of cursive come up with post hoc rationalizations for why they care so much. It’s for the children, of course. But the justifications are specious:
“They need to be able to sign their name.”
Fine, spend a few hours one day teaching them to sign their name.“It affects brain development.”
You get the same development from printing.“They need to be able to read the original Declaration of Independence.”
When they get to this point, proponents of mandatory cursive are grasping at straws.The fact is that cursive is the slide rule of writing. Nostalgia is the motivation for hanging on to it. The world is changing, and that’s upsetting. The offered rationales are pretexts to justify the underlying nostalgia. If we just discovered cursive today, we would be in no rush to force it on our kids.
If teachers and schools decide to spend limited class time on this mode of manufacturing letters, it’s not the end of the world, but making it mandatory is not a useful or necessary use of the General Assembly’s power.
On the subject of cursive versus printing and the lack of data concerning benefits from cursive that aren’t present with printing — and Sen. Leising’s statements on the matter — I’d recommend this comment to my previous blog entry by Kate Gladstone.
Maybe Leising should focus more on the sham charter school she”encouraged” Ball State to approve via her political influence.
Screwed over the residents of Rush County pretty thoroughly to help out a local influence peddler. The “school” doesn’t have a principal, doesn’t conform to the Indiana curriculum requirements and using a building that should be condemned.
This is another example of people who can’t seem to learn from their mistakes yet who insist on being involved in learning. Don’t you wonder how bad things have to get before these people understand that they should not be involved with issues about which they know squat? Does the number of people applying for teaching licenses have to go to zero? Haven’t they even heard about the legislature that almost voted that pi be equal to 2? Just because someone is elected by the people (or at least some of the people), and they have a desk and a voting button, they were not endowed with any special knowledge about anything. I would argue, however, that when they go to Indianapolis, they leave their brains in the appropriately gendered bathroom.
One advantage of cursive writing might be that it forces kids to learn a new set of symbols with relation to language, as a midpoint between learning the printed english language and learning other languages, many of which also have both printed and cursive forms. The ultimate result being that kids are more enabled to read primary source documents themselves rather than relying solely on secondary sources, which may be biased. As well as to better prepare them to learn other languages in their fullness as well. Whereas contrarily, if one for instance learns Arabic, and attempts to learn the symbols, only to find that they have a cursive element to it, they will likely see the cursive element to be as unnecessary as they see the need to learn cursive in English, but with regard to some languages, cursive is actually the more relevant structure used.
One could argue for instance that learning the second set of characters (uppercase and lowercase) is also unnecessarily burdensome, as we could simply use all caps or all lowercase and it would not lessen the value of the knowledge of the language. (It would in fact lessen the value of the knowledge, as while one understands a, they might not understand A as being associated with the same character, the same is true of the uppercase and lowercase cursive versions of a.) While comparatively, uppercase is seldom used vs lowercase, in the very same way that cursive is seldom used comparative to uppercase.
My point here is to state that there are relevant reasons to teach cursive in school, not that it is the place of the legislature to mandate it. The unfortunate consequence of kids not learning cursive is that they can be easily forbidden access to knowledge, simply by writing them in cursive. This in the very same way that one is forbidden access to knowledge if it is written in a language that they don’t understand. You either learn the language, or you rely solely on secondary sources for information on the topic. We all know that relying solely on secondary sources places the reader at the whim of the writer (as they cannot verify or disprove the accuracy of the secondary source).
Language might not be as fun as philosophy (or law, whatever your personal preference is), but lack of knowledge of language will prevent, or reduce, ones ability to learn anything else. In my opinion, we should focus more highly on language than we do, though I also find it disturbing that philosophy is not taught, at least in high school. Of course, you are correct to say that we must prioritize certain subjects, but as the basis of public education is to prepare students for a life full of learning, I think language is arguably the single most important subject (math is the only other topic which IMHO could surpass language in importance, though both are undeniably important). Science for instance can not be taught without sufficient knowledge of both language and math (I suppose you can learn elements of science without math, but in such case you are again stuck relying solely on secondary or tertiary sources). Though I would argue that the philosophical branch of logic at least is equally important to preparing students for a life full of learning.
With all the advancements in technology that make learning easier, one should not have to sacrifice one subject for another. The reason we are considering eliminating cursive is not really because it lacks educational merit, but because students don’t want to learn it (or don’t see the value). If we used this same litmus test for prioritizing subject matter, there are quite a few more subjects that we would be eliminating (ancient history for instance is a particularly unpopular subject as a kid, though as you grow older you better recognize the importance of it).