As new generations come and go, the art of Cursive writing has fazed out of schools.
For one English professor at Fanshawe College, Dr. Claire Senior, she says that in her classes she has seen the population of Cursive writers go down, ” Certainly in the post secondary level where I teach two WRIT courses and one of them is the regular prompt booklet course and in the 14 prompts I have marked earlier today, one is written in a hybrid cursive-print form and all the others are written in print.”
Professor Senior also understands that were now in a technological world but it should still be necessary to be taught in schools, ” In terms of note taking, not everybody has access to digital devices and cursive writing is much faster than printing. It’s been proven by all kinds of theorists that writing something down instead of typing it, you are gonna remember more. Finally there has been many reports that we now have a generation of teenagers who don’t have a signature. They don’t know how to write their names because they don’t know how to produce cursive writing and that is scary.”
After all, cursive writing has its history as the technique has been in existence for thousands of years, with the Romans being among the first to develop written script for business transactions and correspondence. Later on in history, the United States deceleration of independence was written in cursive to President Abraham Lincoln drafting his Gettysburg speech in cursive but head of exhibitions at the London museum Melanie Townsend says that the decline of cursive writing goes back to the 1930’s,
” There was groups of people in the business world that said why are we teaching cursive writing in school. We don’t need to teach it any more as we have type writers. They standardised communication between businesses so it’s a communication we don’t need any more.”
With so many students unable to cursive, this may be the end of an era of the art of writing with current and future generations no longer needing to learn it with it being fazed out in schools.
