I believe in cursive

Don't try reading this if you don't know cursive!  You'll have to rely on someone else to tell you what it says!

Here's a link to an article about how cursive is being pushed out of school curriculum.   I think this is a really bad idea.

• Not knowing cursive means you are just that much more illiterate.  It means you can't read your own language when written in cursive.
• Not knowing cursive means that you can't read anything from the 'olden' days.  You can't thumb through old letters, for example and understand what's been written.  I found an old letter that my grandfather had written to my father on his birthday (maybe his 16th?).  It was so beautiful, so loving, from a devoted and proud father to his son.  If I couldn't read cursive, I would have missed that connection to the past.  I would be cut off from it.
• Writing in cursive is great for dysgraphic/dyslexic kids.  You don't have to worry about reversing letters!
• Writing in cursive is often quicker than printing.  My oldest daughter fought me on cursive so I gave up but guess what, she's in college now and writes all her notes in cursive!
• My oldest son was diagnosed dysgraphic when he was 12.  Guess what the therapists did to correct the situation?  Well, all kinds of crazy therapeutic exercises that had him crossing the midline.  But they also took Handwriting Without Tears and made him do cursive!  And it helped, enormously.  He went from someone who dreaded writing, really it paralyzed him, to someone with confidence in his capabilities.  
• Ever looked into Waldorf education?  You know how they have 'form' drawing?  Well, it's basically cursive penmanship practice.  There can be something therapeutic about practicing those loops!
• Writing in cursive can be aesthetically pleasing.
• You do still have to sign your 'John Hancock' for financial and legal documents.  Really most adult signatures are in cursive.  They are far more stylish that way!
• I think you have to learn cursive in order to read cursive.  If you just try to give them lessons in reading it, it just doesn't stick, in my experience.  Learning cursive can take at least a couple of years to really consolidate things.  It's difficult for most people.  But I think it is well worth the effort.



Where would Ken Burns have been, without all those lovely letters written home during the Civil War?  How about all those journals and diaries?  Shut off to our children who don't know cursive!



I know writing in cursive isn't a life and death matter.   My husband never got the hang of cursive and always prints (which is by the way barely legible even so).  However, he can read it!  My middle son loathes cursive, but maybe he'll change when he gets older, like his older sister.  But I do think education is about empowerment; about equipping our children with the ability to learn and denying them cursive doesn't empower them and it does, in my opinion. limit them.  It's a shame.