Adults Lose Skills to AI. Children Never Build Them. (Psychology Today, 3/22)

[hunter]

52. Cursive was torture for me.

My mom made me take typing in seventh grade and that skill made writing fun again.

In fifth, sixth, and seventh grade teachers demanded cursive. In eighth grade I had only one teacher who required cursive and I hated that class. I couldn't write fast enough to finish exams, which seemed unfair.

In high school and college none of my teachers cared.

I entered kindergarten reading at a fourth or fifth grade level. That probably cemented the shapes of words in my mind. I never did "phonics." I was given independent reading throughout elementary school. As a weird autistic spectrum kid that only made me weirder from the perspective of my classmates.

I can type as fast as I think. My second grade scrawl is almost as fast. Four years of misery got me nowhere with cursive.

Today good typing skills are more important than cursive. When I took typing there was only one other boy in our class of thirty. Boy's didn't type. Fortunately that wasn't my dad's position. He wasn't much good at shooting so the Army taught him to type. It was a skill he respected. My mom was an excellent typist.

Promoting cursive seems a perverse political issue to me. I'm much more concerned about innumeracy and scientific illiteracy. Critical thinking skills and the various arts are also more important than any mandatory teaching of cursive.