As a left-handed kid in school, cursive was a bit of a nightmare.

As a student of history who has seen countless beautiful examples of medieval calligraphy, chancery scripts, and renaissance typography, modern school cursive is a fucking abomination. It was developed neither for speed nor beauty nor legibility, but to reduce the amount of ink dripping from cheap dip pens when they were lifted from the page between strokes.

The danger in making a virtue of necessity is that some people will continue to fetishize it long after the necessity has passed.

It was worthless back in the 90s.

There has to be a better and more useful way to achieve those benefits than cursive writing. Maybe we expand art classes as opposed to this? Maybe cursive writing is just taught as more like calligraphy in an art class? I don’t see a value or learning cursive in like English class. I’m old though so had to learn it and in the over 40 years of knowing cursive the only time I use it or read it is my signature.

I find cursive to be far less readable than small caps architectural and engineering drafting handwriting. I wish that were taught from a young age.

Why have personalized handwriting when you can have 100% legible block text at all times with zero ambiguity?!

Wow, even California is back to legalizing child abuse.

I was in school in the 80's and 90's. We had to exclusively use cursive from grades 3 (I think) through 8. I hated every second and most looked forward to high school because I knew I'd never use cursive again.

I've especially always had this irrational distaste for the cursive letter b.

Please no. Cursive fucking sucks. This is not something we should bring back. Let it die for fucks sake.

The main problem I have with it is if your hand writing sucks it’s impossible to read cursive. It just looks like scribble.

Not so much of a problem for good handwriting but most people just suck at it.

I think reading cursive should be required, but writing cursive? I'm just happy if kids can develop neat standard handwriting (printing).

The issue with not being able to at least read cursive handwriting is receiving a letter or looking at an old document and/or signatures written in cursive, in perfect English, and being like, "I don't know what this says."

It's like having a mild illiteracy. Pointless or not, I'd feel like an idiot if I couldn't decipher these common things.

learning cursive improves cognitive development, reading comprehension and fine motor skills, among other benefits.

There've been studies saying this for a couple decades at least.

This is so alien to me, do other Europeans struggle with cursive? Is it a geography or an age thing?
Personally, it feels like a natural way to write and link letters quickly. I think it's taught in a backwards way, and a lot of people never develop their calligraphy skills because of that, but once you understand the point of cursive, it makes sense. And it's one more way to express yourself. It can be as legible/ambiguous as you want to make it. You can add fancy ligatures, or keep it clean.

Fuck cursive, just let it die old people

There are times I have to present in meetings and share my computer screen, so I can’t really take notes using my laptop.

I learned cursive & it enables me to take faster hand-written notes as people comment or ask questions. That’s just a personal anecdote, I know, but fwiw I do use it on a regular basis but I realize that’s not applicable to most folks.

The comments here are the kind of visceral reaction to cursive that I only ever saw online and in english, makes me think it's mostly from the USA thanks to the location of the news.

Improved reading comprehension

I suppose if you don't know cursive, you can't read it and that would put a damper on your ability to comprehend it if you can't even read it.

And fine motor skills

If you write legibly, it might. Cant comprehend if I can't read it, and I can't read it 90% of the time because whoever wrote it has crappy penmanship since they just wrote big flowing loops or tiny little scribbles instead of words that can be read by human eyes.

What a fat waste of time!

If my kids had to do this, I'd just tell them to ignore the lessons and take a nap.

If the teachers have a problem, they can call me :)