If you’ve been following the news recently, you’ve probably come to terms with the fact a major attack on our way of life comes up every week or so. The most recent examples have been Michael Moore’s assault on capitalism, Obama’s push against long summer vacations, Jenny Slate’s dropping of the F-bomb on “Saturday Night Live” and Glenn Beck’s campaign against his own sanity. These days, there is no shortage of things to get riled up about; pretty much anyone can find something.
And many people do. If you’re going to put off all the important goals you want to accomplish anyway, it feels a lot nobler to protest the death of the American way than to sit on the couch watching House reruns. You might even say getting worked up over nothing is the American way.
So, my fellow Americans (and international students who would like to experience American culture firsthand), I come with news of a new development to get angry about: an assault on the American lifestyle; an assault on cursive writing.
Yes, that’s right, the alternative to printing that you learned in second grade and stopped using in sixth grade is now facing its tragic decline. Primary school systems, both public and private, have started phasing out cursive lessons to the point where some schools have stopped teaching it altogether.
Now, as assaults on our American lifestyle go, this one’s actually OK with me. My handwriting has always been abysmal, and when we were learning how to print in kindergarten, I was always jealous of my classmates with good handwriting who got the gold stars on their work when I got the lame “Good Job!” stickers. This lasted for weeks – we went through the same routine for 26 separate letters. And maybe for some numbers too (I don’t really remember – it’s been a while).
When we finally got past the emphasis on handwriting, I finally began getting gold stars on my assignments. I enjoyed a year or so of gold-star-induced positive reinforcement. Then we moved on to cursive, and my handwriting started costing me stars again.
So thanks to cursive writing, I lost twice as many of my precious gold stars as I would have otherwise. We can thus conclude cursive is a huge evil conspiracy to crush the dreams of little children. That sounds reasonable.
And after all that pain and heartache, cursive has done me no good. As soon as I was able, I switched back to printing everything I wrote, and when I got to high school, I was encouraged to type most of my assignments, which is understandable since most correspondences in the real world are expected to be typed.
For instance, if I had handwritten this article in cursive and submitted it (that’d be ironic, huh?), I don’t think my editors would have been particularly amused. Partly because it would look like I just wrote two pages of Farsi, and partly because handwritten text is pretty much useless to them.
After the advent of word processing, cursive just doesn’t seem useful anymore. Even when it comes to communication that must be handwritten, printing is the dominant form of writing. The College Board, who administers the SAT, after unveiling its new writing section, found only about 15 percent of college-bound students write in cursive, while the rest use print. I consider this a good thing (that’ll teach cursive to take my gold stars).
What’s more, the average student’s cursive skills peak at about the fourth grade. After that, the only time most people use cursive is when signing their names. So all the evidence would seem to indicate cursive is not going to be around for much longer.
For the time being, most elementary schools are still covering cursive, albeit briefly. The emphasis now has shifted from elegant handwriting to content and clarity of expression. And in our age of e-mails, text messages and word processing, that sounds like a better focus anyway. Not to mention, it protects poor defenseless children from having their gold stars unjustly stolen from them.
So in the long run, it’s hard to say for certain what will happen to cursive writing. Maybe it will get relegated to being as important as coloring inside the lines and not making a mess with glue and construction paper. Or maybe cursive’s naysayers will get their way and eliminate cursive from the elementary school curriculum entirely.
Regardless, there will still be plenty of people who resent the decline of what they consider an art form – people who insist that cursive is a hallmark of our elementary schools and a fundamental skill necessary for our way of life. So if you’re one of those people, go grab your torch and pitchfork. An attack on the American lifestyle has begun.
McNeill Williford is a senior majoring in industrial engineering. He can be contacted at [email protected].