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this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2023
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Conservatives are trying to prevent kids from learning history and sex ed, and we're still hearing this bullshit lamentation about CURSIVE?
Schools are underfunded, teachers are underpaid and overworked, students are graduating barely able to read and with no critical thinking skills.
Who in their right mind is actually concerned about kids learning cursive?
Things I'd rather schools focus on:
Typing, Personal finance, Current events, Technology literacy, Graphic design, Human Computer Interaction
Or maybe practical skills related to trades or how to fix things: CAD, Cooking, Electrical, Plumbing
Literally ANYTHING but this cursive crap. It's useless, it's dead, move on.
To be fair, it's trivially easy to learn cursive and it's basically always been an extension of penmanship.
I've never been in a situation where penmanship mattered. Typing skills on the other hand are abysmal across the board and hamper my coworkers constantly.
It's an easy way to teach fine motor control.
Or disassembling electornics, which ice used way more than fucking cursive.
I'm really confused by all of these not being on the curriculum. I went to secondary school in the 90s in the UK. I had learned joined up writing in early primary school (which was what you used to write essays and coursework) and I had both an electronics class where we soldered circuits and IT class where typing improvement games were available.
It really isn’t. Some people have a talent for it, most don’t.
Y'all don't use whiteboards?
Why is penmanship anything that we care about now? Who writes things outside of notes?
But why do children need to be required to learn it when there are more pressing skills that they need?
How are you supposed to do any of this when your brain hemispheres aren't connected? If you don't link your letters, you ain't wire your brain cells. /s
I once saw a post on Facebook claiming this unironically. I learned cursive (or a simplified version I think) in school and thought it's still the standard until I saw the Facebook post and was like "so what". How can people get so emotional about such details? Teach your kid cursive at home when it's so important for you! Oh, you don't have kids but a strong opinion about education? Share it on Facebook! I'm not there anymore and for a while now.
Absolutely they need to teach finance. I remember when I had to get a mortgage for my house and it was a complete slog because I had absolutely no idea how the whole process was supposed to work. The thing is its actually not that complicated, but because I didn't know what I was doing it took forever and was stressful.
Schools teach academics. Parents teach life skills. Teachers already have enough to handle, I don't understand this recent push to make teachers teach shit that parents should be explaining.
I somewhat agree that you can't expect teachers to teach kids everything. A professor explained to me once that school should teach you how to learn and a degree is a demonstration of your ability to learn.
The issue I have with what you're saying is that we know that not everyone wins the birth lottery and has two parents with the time to raise their kids properly.
Public school should be an equalizer and it shouldn't matter what kind of family you were born into. And yes, that probably means smaller class sizes, more teachers, more specialization of teachers, or just plain giving the teachers the resources they would need to teach some of these critical things. I know teachers and know that they are underpaid and overworked, we can't ask more of them without addressing that first.
I'm just very concerned about the long term impact to our civilization of leaving too much teaching up to parents who themselves are uneducated. There are no qualifications needed to become a parent, unlike being a teacher. Some parents that I talk to, you can't get more than four sentences into a conversation with them before they start spouting off conspiracy theories or justifying racism and if schools aren't allowed to teach these kids anything to the contrary then I fear for the future.
I'm also concerned about the perverse incentive that corporations have in a capitalist economy to ensure that kids aren't properly educated. Kids who aren't taught anything about finance are more likely to be preyed on by credit card companies, student loan sharks, etc. Corporations are constantly working to deceive us on all matter of topics and kids need to have at least a baseline of understanding of some of these things or they will get screwed over really easily.
Im kind of with you. It's going to come off as arrogant, but in HS and college I feel like learned how to learn new things. I was never taught how to get a mortgage by my parents...nor any financial stuff for that matter. I learned it all myself. I read up on investing, when I went to get a mortgage I read up on that and learned the ins and outs. I learned the basics of retirement planning all on my own...because I grew up in a wealthy area where they could focus on these things due to socio-economic reasons.
On the other hand, other people are not so lucky and these are vital life skills. If we aren't going to be able to teach everyone how to really learn, we should probably be teaching them some of these common and basic life skills.
My tiny quibble with your post is that I wish you had included critical thinking in your first list. Other than that this is spot on.
That being said, my kids are learning cursive and I'm happy for it. It's not something that requires years of in depth study to learn. My third grader is only a few months into school and can already read and write cursive after just starting it this year.
But if it were gone, I wouldn't bat an eye.
How to pay taxes and make a budget. Media literacy. Nutrition. How to drive a car. Coding. The list goes on and on.
You guys seem to be under the impression you can’t do both. I learnt all of that in high school (some as extracurricular but computers were relatively new). You can definitely have both.
Cursive takes a few hours to learn to read.
Maybe for an adult, but they literally spent two and a half years drilling it endlessly at my school and doomsaying about how you'd fail out if you didn't master it, only for me to move on to middle school and immediately be presented with my first typed essay assignment.
It's just such a silly hill to die on all so people who did learn it don't feel silly because nobody else reads it.
It sounds like the curriculum is a mess more than anything. You shouldn't be taught something you are not allowed to then use.
When teaching how to drive a car they need to teach the skill of actually looking and processing what's happening rather than just the mechanics of how to operate the vehicle.
Most people seem to drive along without any real awareness of what's happening around them which is what causes most accidents. Sure, that car shouldn't have pulled out in front of you from a side road, but if you'd been paying attention you would have been able to see they were doing it, and avoided the crash.
Now I may be a bit biased, but it would be nice if people could read my hand writing. There are just some people that write in cursive despite it not being taught. It was mentioned once in 2nd grade for me and for some reason it stuck.
Well cursive helps people with dyslexia
Says who? I have dyslexia and learned cursive, still can't read it.
It's not like there are multiple kinds of dyslexia...
Yes dyslexia effects, different people differently like every disorder. But its well known that sans serif, monospaced fonts improve reading and spelling overall in everyone with dyslexia. Which is supported by this research article https://www.researchgate.net/publication/262320823_Good_fonts_for_dyslexia
No it doesn't.
Every time you look at cursive it just looks like a series of random squiggles. If you already have problems with character recognition how is making it illegible going to help?
It makes each one one thing. Some if my family were given cursive kessons sooner to help them. It more about helping them write not so much help for the reader.