Alas, poor Cursive! I knew it well: a writing style of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy.
Cursive is dead. Those who love it must face facts. A generation of schoolchildren is graduating high school without ever having learned it. Within twenty years, cursive will join both typewriters and that old long ‘s’ that looked like an ‘f.’
To be sure, cursive isn’t going down without a fight. Several state legislatures are passing laws requiring cursive to be taught in public schools. But their delaying actions won’t win the war. It’s lost.
Advocates for cursive have their arguments, their rationales for making kids learn it. But these justifications seem forced; many are equally valid for printing by hand.
Against these pro-cursive arguments is the more compelling one; it’s not worth the time. It takes a long time to teach and learn cursive, but few adults read it or write it on a daily basis. With all the other competing demands on teachers’ time, imparting cursive no longer has any necessity. The opportunity cost is too high.
You want cursive? Tell teachers to stop teaching keyboard skills, self-esteem, anti-bullying, and the other added requirements they were told to squeeze into the same amount of classroom time.
Many individuals, including me, lament the demise of cursive. As an author, all my stories and many of my blog posts start in cursive. With it, I can set down first drafts much faster while avoiding the distractions of the keyboard and its associated Internet.
But society won’t miss cursive, and will dump it in history’s dustbin without much afterthought. A few people in every generation will teach themselves to read it, much as a few can read Cuneiform, Latin, or Old English today. Those few will always be available to translate any cursive texts that haven’t yet been digitized into print.
Cursive had its day and served us well. No print text can ever match its smooth and curving flow, its personalized style and grace. Print favored the reader; Cursive, the writer. Print was always the plain, practical one; Cursive, her beautiful, fanciful sister.
Sad to say, beauty fades, withers, and dies. Many of us will remember Cursive as she was in life, with her playful loops and arcs, her uninterrupted wiggling lines of ink. Requiescat in pace, Cursive. You’ll be missed by many, including—
Poseidon’s Scribe
