It's worth investigating the effect of ballpoint pen technology on society. Beyond cleanliness and general convenience, the ballpoint pen has stood as an example of technological innovation that makes the rounds in one form or another as the central figure of progress, yet there is a dark side to its past. The Fisher Space Pen did its part to promote the American space program of the 1960s and Xi used the lowly ballpoint as a sticking point to drive innovation into the 2020s, but you don't hear about the poor ergonomics, handwriting atrophy, or lack of cursive being taught in elementary school. We need to consider the analog along with the digital if we're going to elevate ourselves out of the mess we're wallowing in. The education system needs all the help it can get, but in addition to one laptop per child, it would be a good idea to give them analog clocks so they can tell time and fountain pens so they can learn the why and how to read cursive.
I care inasmuch as each of my kids had perfectly readable handwriting up until the moment their school wasted weeks teaching them cursive at which point their writing became a mess, which in turn caused them a fair bit of anxiety over the years. I would have rather they spent the time on literally anything else.
You’d never know it without asking me but my sloppy handwriting is the product of trying to add cursive concepts to my print writing style because everyone said cursive was good therefore it must only be able to enhance print writing. What a phenomenally useless skill. I could have spent those hours reading books.
The person I replied to seemed to imply it was bad that kids aren’t taught cursive. I’ve heard that opinion before, as if cursive were intrinsically valuable. I think it’s like any other hobby skill: if you like using it because of your own enjoyment, awesome! But that doesn’t mean it’s inherently worthwhile for anyone else.
If you write a bunch by hand it is worth it to invest a bit of time into developing a good cursive skill.
But I have to admit I agree with you, I have a very hard time reading cursive(mainly because I don't have to do it much) and I never did have the interest in developing a neat hand. so for what little hand writing I do block characters serve me well enough. hell, most of the time I drop the lowercase letters as well.
If you want speed, there are better options, not the least of which is a keyboard (or steno etc). I haven’t had a use case for cursive since it was required in elementary school. For most purposes that don’t care about speed it is inferior to the block writing styles I learned for engineering.
There are faster versions, but probably not so much the ones that are commonly taught. Also, most of the time one writes plenty fast enough. The only case I can think of where more speed is essential is steno and that is not cursive.
I swear, many years ago, there were papers published that showed print-style handwriting was quicker. Up until then I would have agreed with you; now I'm not so sure, and the sources have drifted into the mists of memory.
The difference with France is that kids (at least mine) learn cursive from a very young age - in the UK where I'm from we learnt cursive when I was around 9 or 10 by which time the bad habits have already been formed.
Yes, when I said "we learn to write in cursive" I should have said, this is the first and only way we learn to write :) .
We actually have the opposite issue. My script handwriting is awful because I never had to learn/use it. For paperwork we sometime have to write letter separately, but it is different than real script writing.
