02/22/2024
If you’d like the student(s) in your life to read and write cursive, I can help!
Gen Z never learned to read cursive.
In 2010, cursive was omitted from the new national Common Core standards for K–12 education, Drew Gilpin Faust wrote in 2022. The students in Faust’s history class, most of whom had been in elementary school in the 2010s, admitted they could not read manuscripts. If they were assigned a research paper, they sought subjects that relied only on published sources. One student reshaped his senior honors thesis for this purpose; another reported that she did not pursue her interest in Virginia Woolf for an assignment that would have involved reading Woolf’s handwritten letters. Many of Faust’s students said they found their professors’ handwritten comments on their work illegible. Sometimes they would ask a teacher to decipher the notes; more often they just ignored them. During his years as Harvard president, Faust writes, she regarded the handwritten note as “a kind of superpower … They provided a way to reach out and say: I am noticing you … Now I wonder how many recipients of these messages could not read them.”
“There is a great deal of the past we are better off without, just as there is much to celebrate in the devices that have served as the vehicles of cursive’s demise. But there are dangers in cursive’s loss,” Faust writes. “Students will miss the excitement and inspiration that I have seen them experience as they interact with the physical embodiment of thoughts and ideas voiced by a person long since silenced by death. Handwriting can make the past seem almost alive in the present.”
Read more: bit.ly/3T7R1ie
