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Indiana Schools Erase Cursive from the Curriculum
Filed under: In The News
Credit: Corbis
Who needs to know how to make swirly letters in this day and age? People can always just scrawl an X or draw a smiley face if they ever have to "sign" a contract.
Educators in Indiana found teaching cursive writing deprived children of valuable time better spent staring at a screen. Besides, as a form of communication, cursive is about as dead as Latin -- or talking to people face-to-face. So state officials eliminated it from the curriculum.
Now kids can focus on learning new emoticons since keyboarding has replaced cursive as a state requirement.
"I think it's progressive of our state to be ahead on this," Denna Renbarger, assistant superintendent for Lawrence Township schools, tells the Indianapolis Star. "There are a lot more important things than cursive writing."
The Star reports that governors of all but four states are collaborating on the Common Core Curriculum -- an effort to make education standards equal across state lines.
Sixth-grader Victoria Linde tells the Star this idea of putting words on paper just seems so strange to kids her age. She thinks kids should focus on keyboarding.
"It sounds more effective to me," she tells the newspaper. "Kids use computers more today."
But Linne Hurley, the mother of a sixth-grader, thinks dropping the requirement is a bad idea. She wonders how children will be able to read original historical documents or even the handwritten notes left behind by their ancestors.
"It's something that's going to be lost," she says.
Steve Graham, a nationally recognized expert on handwriting at Vanderbilt University, dismissed some of the arguments for cursive as "romantic." However, he tells the Star, educators are too hasty in thinking the only way to form words is with a keyboard.
"I don't care if it's cursive or manuscript, you need to be fluent and legible with at least one type of handwriting," Graham adds. "And you need to be fluent on the keyboard."
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ReaderComments (Page 1 of 1)
7-11-2011 @ 7:47PM
donnette said...cursive may be silly to some but i would rather my kids know how to sign their name on a check, contract or letter instead of using an X.
the world is lacking in anything personal as it is! Yes! some of us still write letters as not everyone has email~
Reply
7-11-2011 @ 6:54PM
Kevin said...As a parent of two small children in Indiana I have realized that education is not important to our politicians. Parents will have to teach their children what is important, don't count on the schools. The supers make $250,000 a year and the teachers get laid off.
Reply
7-11-2011 @ 9:39PM
Kate Gladstone said...Handwriting matters ... But does cursive matter?
Research shows: the fastest and most legible handwriters avoid cursive. They join only some letters, not all of them: making the easiest joins, skipping the rest, and using print-like shapes for those letters whose cursive and printed shapes disagree. (Citation on request.)
Reading cursive still matters -- this takes just 30 to 60 minutes to learn, and can be taught to a five- or six-year-old if the child knows how to read. The value of reading cursive is therefore no justification for writing it.
Remember, too: whatever your elementary school teacher may have been told by her elementary school teacher, cursive signatures have no special legal validity over signatures written in any other way. (Don't take my word for this: talk to any attorney.)
Kate Gladstone — CEO, Handwriting Repair/Handwriting That Works
Director, the World Handwriting Contest
Co-Designer, BETTER LETTERS handwriting trainer app for iPhone/iPad
Reply
7-14-2011 @ 1:39AM
christina said...I sort of find this sad. Being a 21 year old, I’m not much of one to value the idea of cursive in this day and age but I feel like the sense of value of pen to paper is becoming a lost dexterity. What are they going to do away with next? Handwriting all together? Thinking about it from the point of view from a person who uses pencil and paper everyday in school, I feel that the motions and fluidity in our ability to use those muscles we’ve been blessed with will become defunct. The pen to paper use always sparked more in the creative path than technology ever did for me. We are teaching children to be lazy. Studies have proven that by writing your notes in class it is more effective when it comes to learning. I feel that we have become too reliant on technology as the way to communicate and have lost the value of our almost always available pen to paper. I think cursive should still be offered in school, they’ve cut back enough on education. There are important documents and information in history that need to be remembered. Stop giving these kids breaks, they slack enough as it is.
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