Can we quit teaching kids how to write in cursive? Seriously. Its outdated. Eighteenth and nineteenth century clerks were trained to write in the exact same script to create an air of professionalism in correspondence. They did well look how pretty the Declaration of Independence is. That was fine for awhile, but then the typewriter came along. Cursive was still more aesthetically pleasing that the half-assed Times New Roman that typewriters used, so cursive lived on. Now we have computers; now cursive must die. No one can read that shit anyway.
The world is run by cursives ugly cousin printing. This is the direct result of developed technology. While computers are perfectly capable of producing script fonts, printed fonts are simply easier to read. Almost every book, newspaper, magazine and website therefore communicates through a printed font one that is standardized and can be infinitely modified for aesthetic purposes. This creates for fewer encounters with what has become the cryptic language of cursive. I propose we let cursive join eight-tracks, washboards and irons that are actually made of iron on a museum shelf somewhere where it can be ignored for decades to come.
I dont even know what a cursive Q looks like. Lowercase g, q, and y all wind up looking the same. Many adults have handwriting that is hard enough to read when each letter is composed on its own trying to mash the ends of each letter together creates a page bearing a greater resemblance to a Rorschach inkblot test than a piece of writing. Its time to break the allegiance to cursive and let our elementary school students focus on printing. Perhaps moving beyond cursive can do for handwriting what moving beyond the abacus did for math.
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