I don't remember people ever writing cursive like what I was taught growing up. People just self-servingly turbo-scribble some chicken-scratch and call it a day. The kid who can't read our B-movie elvish script isn't the one with literacy issues.

We either write within the ballpark of standardization, or we don't. I think kids should be required to put in as much effort into learning cursive, as people put into actually writing cursive. Which is to say, absolutely none at all.

(Sorry to people who actually write legible, clean cursive. I wish I got to read your output in the wild.)

It's not that I never learned how to read cursive; it's that nobody actually writes it legibly.

Conservatives are trying to prevent kids from learning history and sex ed, and we're still hearing this bullshit lamentation about CURSIVE?

Schools are underfunded, teachers are underpaid and overworked, students are graduating barely able to read and with no critical thinking skills.

Who in their right mind is actually concerned about kids learning cursive?

Things I'd rather schools focus on:

Typing, Personal finance, Current events, Technology literacy, Graphic design, Human Computer Interaction

Or maybe practical skills related to trades or how to fix things: CAD, Cooking, Electrical, Plumbing

Literally ANYTHING but this cursive crap. It's useless, it's dead, move on.

This is so puzzling to me, here in Brazil everyone writes in cursive, we all learned fine as children, it exists because it's easier and faster to write with it and you are going to write a lot during all your school life.

Not being able to write cursive I understand.

Not being able to read cursive is an issue that will out your lesser education and put you at a disadvantage in social situations.

Can someone explain why one cannot read cursive? It is just a tilted (sometimes fancy) font, what's so hard about it?

Edit: After being made aware by a fellow lemmy'er and googling it, it seems I confused cursive with italics, English is not my first language. Though I learned cursive at school when I was 6 without realizing it is called cursive in English. It was part of the basic curriculum at that time, didn't know this wasn't a thing in other countries.

It isn't just cursive. I've seen a lot of younger people have issues reading bad copies of older print letters. Part of it isn't being used to seeing information presented in a certain way or not being found via OCR.

Fuck cursive. Being forced to write in that was absolute torture. The forced use of specific esoteric hand-cramping illegible scribbles is asinine.

There surely was a use for penmanship before the proliferation of ballpoint pens and typewriters, but the way it was taught while I was in school was completely backwards. The intent of writing in script is to quickly flow from one letter to another without needing to lift the nib of a quill; rote learning of individual hieroglyphs with full disregard for the writer's natural hand movements is at best asinine, and at worst cruel.

The fact that we were tormented decades in the past doesn't justify more torment now. Be better.

Cursive is dumb anyways. Let's have a second way to write that's harder To do, less legible, and designed for old school fountain pens no one uses that have difficulty with upstrokes

I thought cursive was the American word for joined up handwriting, but reading this thread I don't really get what it means.

The only times I used cursive was to sign my name on important documents. Now I don't even do that anymore. I just write my name with normal letters without lifting the pen.

In this thread:

Americans: Why do I need to learn it when I can just type?

The World: It's literally just writing. You don't want to learn how to write??

I write exclusively in cursive. It's natural for me and everyone around me was taught it as well.

I hate cursive.

For me I was taught cursive in elementary school, but it felt like I couldn't keep up writing assignments so i just stuck with printing which evolved to chicken scratch notes.

I don't get it. Are children in north-america taught writing with block letters ? What do your writing copybooks look like ?

Meh...cursive shouldn't be a compulsory lesson. It should be part of art or advanced lit. It just not a necessary skill these days.

The only time I ever use cursive is when I write my signature, and it's mostly just loops and squiggles.