Should Schools Teach Cursive? (acceptance, best, art, program)
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The most important reason of all is that cursive hooks up the brain, the eyes, and the muscles of the arm and hand in completely unique ways that are singular to only the person who is writing. This complicated process creates a very special kind of small muscle function and coordination that helps everyone in so many ways they can't be counted. Our hands are extensions of our eyes. The more the pair are developed, the better a human can communicate with another human.
A notebook or a piece of paper needs no batteries for communication. Neither does a pencil or a pen.
Cursive writing was invented for one purpose- speed. Writing a letter in cursive is nearly as fast as writing on a keyboard, when the time used in composing is taken into account.
Paper communication is much more personal and carries more authority, weight, and emotional impact than the electronic word. It encourages the use of better spoken language as well, because it has greater impact.
Cursive writing helps eye-hand coordination, helps develop the fluid flow of thoughts, and will last in time far longer than the electronic word.
Think of the billions of electronic documents that were composed and are stored on obsolete computers that don't work now. Even if the computer works, there is no longer any way to get the documents out of the computer and on to a printed page.
The thoughts in all those words aren't obsolete. Only the machine is. If they were written in cursive, on paper, those thoughts could be read 100, 200, or 300 years from now and would still have the same impact on a human mind as when the ink that wrote them was still wet.
I use my computer daily, but I also keep a journal, and have, ever since 1990. I write in cursive, and I still possess most of my journals, though a few have been now lost to time. I began journaling a year before I first used a computer. I'm now using my 4th computer, and everything I wrote on 3 of them is now lost to me or anyone else, except for this one. In time, this one, too, will be obsolete and unaccessible.
I'm now on journal #70. All of them take up a couple of shelves in a portable book case. If I remember some event I want to revisit, all I have to do is remember the year it happened, and I can go back and re-read what I wrote in a few minutes. Anyone can read them.
Long after I'm gone, anyone could still read them. All a person would need is a sunny window to read them. If I could write this message longhand, I would. It's a more pleasurable exercise by far than wriggling my fingertips.
If I was to try to print the 870,000 words I've written over those years, I would have given up journaling long ago. It's simply too slow, and printing does not allow the fast flow of thought to page like cursive does.
Cursive conveys emotion like no other means, too. Everyone who writes cursively displays their emotional state very clearly in their handwriting. Every person's handwriting is as unique to them as their fingerprints too.
Printing masks these emotions, as a printed letter is either A or a. A cursive A can be written legibly in a hundred different ways and still look like an A.
All these reasons and more are why cursive should come back into our education system. Artificial intelligence is a big deal these days, and is growing bigger every day. Cursive handwriting is so human no artificial intelligence will ever look like it.
1. You should back up your computer...seriously, you get a new computer and just ignore everything in the old one?????
2. Printing helps eye coordination as much as cursive, many of us are even faster at printing than cursive.
3. Nothing else you have posted gives a good reason to make it a mandatory part of our time crunched school curricula.
If it is important to you than teach it to your children but we have reached the end of societal need for cursive.
Putting pen to paper stimulates the brain like nothing else, even in this age of e-mails, texts and tweets. In fact, learning to write in cursive is shown to improve brain development in the areas of thinking, language and working memory. Cursive handwriting stimulates brain synapses and synchronicity between the left and right hemispheres, something absent from printing and typing.
Handwriting dynamically engages widespread areas of both cerebral hemispheres. Virginia Berninger, a researcher and professor of educational psychology at the University of Washington, says that brain scans during handwriting show activation of massive regions of the brain involved in thinking, language, and working memory.3
James herself conducted an experiment in which she scanned the brains of four- and five-year olds before and after half of them had been taught to visually recognize chosen letters and the other half had been taught to write them. After four weeks, brain scans showed that the minds in the second group had enormous spikes in activity in the reading network.
“Typing seems to be different than handwriting,” she says. “You’re actually creating those forms with your hands. That seems to be making a difference.”
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Andrea Gordon, writing for ParentCentral in the Toronto Star, writes on cursive writing’s impact on neurological development. Citing the research of Toronto psychiatrist and neuroplasticity expert Dr. Norman Doidge, she says that cursive writing is unique in that, unlike with print handwriting and typing, each letter connects uniquely to the next This is “more demanding on the part of the brain that converts symbol sequences into motor movements in the hand.” Gordon further ties cursive to emotional circuitry according to Dr. Jason Barton’s research at the University of British Columbia.
“His studies…show that while the left visual word form area perceives and decodes words for their meaning in written language, the right side is where we interpret the style of writing, allowing us to identify the writer rather than the word, just as neighboring areas in the right brain play a key role in allowing us to recognize faces. … It activates a memory trace…and fans out, setting off other sensory memories.”
Cursive also helps children with learning disabilities.
Cursive also helps children with learning disabilities.
I suspect the same is true of video games. And I would think games directed at specific learning processes would work even better.
If one wishes to develop hand eye coordiantion there is nothing much better than a computer. Still trying to do good cursive with a mouse. Easy with a pen...but hard with a mouse.
I suspect the same is true of video games. And I would think games directed at specific learning processes would work even better.
If one wishes to develop hand eye coordiantion there is nothing much better than a computer. Still trying to do good cursive with a mouse. Easy with a pen...but hard with a mouse.
It is true that video games also contribute to both eye-hand coordination and to multitasking and brain power.
Brain researcher Jay Pratt, professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, has studied the differences between men and women in their ability to mentally manipulate 3-D figures. This skill is called spatial cognition, and it's an essential mental skill for math and engineering. Typically, Pratt says, women test significantly worse than men on tests of spatial cognition.
But Pratt found in his studies that when women who'd had little gaming experience were trained on action video games, the gender difference nearly disappeared.
After 10 hours of training, Pratt brought the women back to the lab and gave them the spatial cognition test again.
"And we found that the women improved substantially, and almost caught up to the men's scores," he says.
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"The non-gamers had to think a lot more and use a lot more of the workhorse parts of their brains for eye-hand coordination," Sergio says. "Whereas the gamers really didn't have to use that much brain at all, and they just used these higher cognitive centers to do it."
Ignoring the posts of why yes/why no, 84% of respondents believe it should be taught. However, this is an education forum. I'm curious what the results would be in a generic one?
What do you think? I say so because when writing out checks you should sign your name in cursive. Kids got to start somewhere so I say yes.
When I was in school they taught it!! (I wouldnt know how to write cursive I dont think if they didnt (Even though I dont really ever use it -- AH MAN!!))
Second is a blog, again no referenced research (just other blogs) and does not differentiate between any handwriting and cursive. No one is suggesting children not learn to write by hand, just not cursive.
Again, the cursive vs typing strawman. Only experiment was between children taught to write letters and read them. No experiment between printing and cursive. Children should still learn to write by hand, just not cursive, at least not in public school.
Barton, Jason JS, et al. "Encoding in the visual word form area: An fMRI adaptation study of words versus handwriting." Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 22.8 (2010): 1649-1661. http://www.neurolab.ca/2010(3)_Barton.pdf
This is the paper they all seem to be using (badly) to support their supposition that cursive is "necessary". For clarity this paper has a sample size of THIRTEEN. Anyway, it found that it maybe useful (only two of the 8 measures were even close to statistically significant) to READ cursive, nothing about actually writing it. In fact, of the whooping ten papers I could find that actual compare cursive to handwriting, all of them are imaging studies based only one reading, not writing. In fact I could nothing in the primary lit about writing in cursive vs printing.
Ok teach kids to read cursive, but as has already been stated, you don't need to write in cursive to read it.
Quote:
Cursive also helps children with learning disabilities.
Children with disabilities frequently learn skills other kids do not. Nothing wrong with learning cursive to help with dyslexia. But for the rest of kids what is the point? There is nothing in research to suggest it is necessary, it is becoming more and more obsolete, and just because it is not taught in school doesn't mean kids can't learn it at home or elsewhere.
No one should be graded for their handwriting. Period.
I agree.
While chlldren should be taught how to write cursively legibly, legibilty is relative. Is someone else can read a small child's cursive, that should be enough. Grading on it only makes a little kid who's having coordination trouble feel defeated.
It's like anything. The more a person practices it, any good writing habit that's taught young will improve over time. Writing beautiful looking cursive letters and stringing them into beautiful words and sentences is only a matter of practice with some good model to look at and imitate.
Cursive is also a much better expression of a person's individuality that printed letters. I see so many hand-drawn emoticons kids use now, trying to express the emotions that their handwriting cannot do. Every written word has a specific meaning and definition, but even a simple picture can be interpreted in many different ways, some in keeping with the picture's intention, but others that are totally different.
Cursive easily allows a person's feelings to be observed by another, just by the size, slant, and the stokes of the lettering.All that naturally comes out. because the brain is directing the hand.
i had a notary public tell me that kids are printing their signatures because they don't know cursive. she tells them that she can reproduce that 'signature' and it doesn't qualify for legal documents.
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