Do they still teach cursive in school? They shouldnât. Itâs like how they used to teach Latin; nobody uses it, itâs a dead communication system that only old people care about because they were required to learn it when they were kids
My elementary school taught us cursive in 4th grade, saying that 5th grade teachers would only accept work done in cursive, then in 5th grade we literally never used it for any reason and would often get points off if we did because the teacher couldnât read our cursive handwriting.
I didnât think about cursive again until 12th grade; I was taking the ACT and on the back it had a paragraph saying âI promise I will not cheat on this test,â and apropos of nothing we were told we had to copy it down word for word in cursive. Like, that was the schoolâs way of making sure we didnât cheat; instead of just having us sign our names, they made us sign an entire paragraph. What? Why? Whose idea was that? They really expected us to remember something we hadnât done in 8 years? Something that we didnât even practice long enough to commit to muscle memory?
Schools need to stop teaching obsolete concepts. My teacher always said âyou need to learn to do long division because youâre not gonna be carrying a calculator everywhere you go,â then the iPhone came out that year, and now literally everyone has a calculator on them at all times. We arenât taught how to use an abacus or a slide rule, we arenât required to write on slate with chalk, we donât have to use a microfiche reader or the Dewey decimal system in the library, so why are we still taught Depression Era concepts like cursive?
