Cursive, foiled again

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In Ontario this fall, Grade 3 students will be learning cursive script again, in a move that some educators are hailing as an important back-to-basics step to foundational education. The argument is that cursive improves hand-eye motor skills, and actually helps students with both attention spans and comprehension.

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Opinion

In Ontario this fall, Grade 3 students will be learning cursive script again, in a move that some educators are hailing as an important back-to-basics step to foundational education. The argument is that cursive improves hand-eye motor skills, and actually helps students with both attention spans and comprehension.

It isn’t happening in Manitoba.

For those among us who have always had bad handwriting, that might seem almost like a blessing: remembering the painful and near-endless practice of trying to learn to control fractious pens and pencils, trying and failing to keep the loops and curves of cursive within the proscribed lines of the handwriting practice book, is akin to remembering with fond nostalgia the “good old days” of when schoolyard bullying was seen as a necessary real-world “toughening” experience.

Mary Altaffer / Associated Press files

Practising cursive handwriting.

Who would wish that on anyone else, especially on our own children?

You can understand the goal, though.

The need to improve attention spans is especially laudable, as we supply our children with electronic devices like tablets and cellphones that actively destroy that ability to fully concentrate on just one thing.

But there is a simple message to keep in mind: things change. And you can’t simply put time in reverse. Working with hand tools doesn’t necessarily prepare you to work with power tools — or run a computerized lathe.

There’s another message, too, about how quickly things can disappear when they aren’t seen as a necessity — in this case, in less than a generation.

Editors who have dealt with letters to the editor for years can tell you that, in years past, a letter that arrived displaying perfectly balanced and clear cursive had its own intrinsic weight, a gravitas, even before its words were read.

The only equivalent now is actually in the obverse: the immediate disdain the editor has upon opening an emailed letter to the editor that’s written all in caps, with seven exclamation points at the end of each sentence.

Though we might not like to admit it, form has a subtle way of prejudicing the mind, for both good and bad.

But a need for “good penmanship” doesn’t appear in the “help wanted” advertisements any more, and the need to communicate effectively and electronically has hugely overtaken the need to be able to put pen to paper and come up with a legible result. You might say, haughtily, that “kids today can’t even sign a cheque.”

That may be true: also true is the fact that, in the unlikely event that they actually receive a cheque for their birthday or Christmas, they wouldn’t sign it anyway. Heck, they won’t head to the bank — or even a banking machine — to deposit it. They’ll take a photograph of the cheque with their phone, and deposit it completely remotely, without ever touching pen to paper.

Teaching cursive handwriting solely as a mechanism to improve comprehension skills and concentration seems like an odd approach: like bringing back buggy whip instruction to improve hand-eye coordination (though that’s probably an over-the-top comparison).

Will we miss the almost inevitable disappearance of cursive?

No doubt. Truth is, for a significant part of the population, it’s already gone.

But we will also most likely miss it the way we look back with fondness at sepia photographs of men wearing full suits and hats to work, even at the quarry.

Like we’ll soon miss the appreciation of the motor skills of a driver who is a dab hand at both the smooth co-ordination of a stick-shift manual transmission and the clutch pedal.

In other words, we’ll have fond memories of what appears to have been a simpler time, rather than from needing to retain the actual skill.

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