This take is honestly bewildering to me. What do you mean “for no reason”? You learn it to write quickly and legibly. What other option is there? Writing in block letters like a kindergartener?? inb4 “bUt eVeRyThInG iS dIgItAl nOw”. I’m a programmer, about as digital as you can get, and even I whip out the pen and paper for mindmapping and notetaking.
I work in construction. To communicate on site we need to do a lot of quick ugly drawings and writing notes on site in places way too dirty to use a computer. We do it by hand, and of course we write in cursive. I am also extremely bewildered by this post and it comments.
I was told I needed it to communicate and get a job. None of those were true. And I hated the process of learning it.
To be fair, no one can see the future, so there was no way that my teachers could know.
Sometimes life is just shit.
I’m also a programmer, almost all of my note taking is now digital. I have a small scratchpad when thinking things out tactilely, but that needs to be legible to only me for all of an hour, and often is just a few unconnected words
Yeah but what life event causes some people to forever write in all capital letters?
I’m appalled by the absolute state of these comments. I expected more from what felt like largely a leftist space. more than yearning for ignorance. there’s no space where knowledge is sacred anymore I guess.
good capitalist boy. bark. sit. work your ass off. never learn anything that doesn’t give you immediate practical results, you understand? you’re only to learn things that produce and/or consume. you’re not to enjoy knowledge for the sake of it or anything that might spark creativity. we have AI for creative endeavors. you do the work. don’t wonder. don’t be curious. don’t even think about thinking. does it make money? does it spend money? no? then stop and get fucking back to work.
School as we know it was designed to produce workers, and cursive was a part of that. They taught us cursive because they thought we would need it for work.
cursive != calligraphy
And here i was thinking it was a way to write quickly and neatly
I was born in the 90s and we didnt have computers in school for us to use til I was around 12 or 13? And that was dedicated computer science class, and I went to a school known for math and science.
You needed to write your notes. By thr time I hit 14/15 we had to type our assignments but we were still using notebooks in class.
It was only by the time I hit college that people were using laptops in class.
So up until then, most people were still writing. I still write letters to people I care about - my girlfriend, friends who live far away, etc.
Also consider the vast amount of studies that show that handwriting helps people memorize or learn at a far higher rate than typing does.
Funny enough my younger brother is a good amount younger than me. He grew up with typing, his school gave him a Chromebook to start, laptops in every class, etc. It’s just a difference in what you were taught and why, based on when you grew up. I don’t think anyone expected us to go from n64 to ps4 in less than 20 years. The boom of technology has killed handwriting. But considering that for the longest time tech didn’t advance at the rate that it has been doing since like 2008 or so, it makes sense that people were taught to write. Writing has been around for thousands of years. It’s probably still a skill you want to be able to do, and do legibly
I write by hand so rarely that I just use sans serif.
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If it’s for class notes, then the extra time helps me memorize it better.
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If it’s for someone else, then it will be actually legible.
Cursive users tend to overestimate how legible their handwriting is to others.
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sounds american. in normal countries it’s a way to learn several things, including how to write and read a form of writing, improving fine motor skills, and hopefully being able to write quickly. just because you or anyone else hated it and didn’t bother to get better at it doesn’t mean it was for no reason.
even if so, this has no bearing on my comment which was about people’s complaints about learning things that are not practical. there are people who complain that they had to learn 8 (maybe 9 if they’re old enough) planets in order. oh the horror of knowing which of any two planets is further! multiplication table, probably the single most helpful part of math that helps with quick calculations without assistance? oh no! what about capitals? I can’t put capitals in my excel sheet and earn a bonus!
then people will complain having got to where we are. this is why. because apparently learning anything that you can’t implement in everyday life is a burden.
The problem with memorizing 50 capitals (or anything else useless) is opportunity cost. They could be learning useful things instead.
I think we agree that learning things just for capitalism is bad, but possibly disagree about whether schools are currently doing that by teaching cursive. Anecdotally, I was told that I would need it for work.
what’s useful knowledge to specifically replace 50 capitals?
Any information that’s useful whatsoever? Maybe I’m not understanding your question.
I’d love it if everyone could label a supply and demand diagram, and that’s about as hard as memorizing 50 capitals.
what I’m asking is how you determine what’s useful and what isn’t. unsurprisingly seems to come back to getting a good capitalist boy again.
I think capitalism persists because most people can’t label a supply and demand diagram.
none of these are specifics, they’re topics. but I didn’t ask for that anyway. i said what’s supposed to specifically replace the 50 capitals. none of these qualify. also “I wish this was taught” isn’t really an argument for something else not to be taught. why not replace something else? what is going to determine the cut?
most of this list is about how things should be taught, by the way. I agree that learning problem solving skills, curiosity and thirst for knowledge and know-how to obtain knowledge is better than learning facts. this doesn’t explain the disdain for basic knowledge about your country, the solar system or the fucking multiplication table.
Or maybe cursive just sucks and needs to go away, while all the rest of us choose to value knowledge by learning things that are worth learning.
no it doesn’t and you sound like you’re just annoyed by having to learn it when you didn’t want to. this is the kind of thinking that put comic sans on everything from restaurant menus to legal documents.
Cursive is so bad I would choose Comic Sans over cursive any day. 🤣
well at least you confirmed my point
There’s a wide gap between only learning practical money producing skills… And trying to include cursive in a list of life/mind expanding knowledge.
It’s just pointless and dumb. It might be faster to write, than normal letting, but for anyone other than yourself, it takes longer to read, as no one actually follows any of the standards. They make up their own shortcuts and it becomes a squiggly mess.
That’s what art class is for, which includes calligraphy.
But more seriously, I find writing things down on a piece of paper so much better and serious than taking notes digitally.
That radiator be thicc
Perfect for the cat.
I’m a millennial. I was also taught cursive for absolutely no reason.
First of all, why? It’s supposed to be easier/quicker to write things down using cursive but honestly, I can’t understand people’s chicken scratch cursive anyways, so it’s basically meaningless. You might as well give someone a list of scribbles and just have them call you later for what it should say.
That’s basically it. Signatures, sure, maybe, but bluntly, who gives a damn?
Fuck cursive.
Just practice drawing this single letter while I get over my wine hangover for the next 40 minutes. Heaven forbid someone gets bored and acts out.
training fine motor skills at a young age is worth nothing… gotcha :D
There are better ways to accomplish that
might be true… but you don’t learn writing cursive with those ;)
And? Playing games has been a far better use of my time than learning cursive.
Times I’ve written in cursive: nil.
Games I’ve played: more than nil.
I can barely read my own cursive if I try to write fast
I find it quicker to write in a mix of cursive and regular if taking notes
It’s way neater in cursive
Also peoples handwriting skills have absolutely tanked since typing and computers became widespread
If you were writing constantly you generally had decent hand writing. Growing up, when I was really young, like 3 to 6, we were also graded on the legibility when learning to write
You and I have had very different experiences.
Anyone who has written anything for me in cursive, I have had difficulty understanding, or could not decipher what was written.
My cursive skills never really matured, so maybe that’s the problem
Older Millennial here.
I had to learn cursive, memorize the times table, and know the capital of every god damn state. I had to remember the order of planets. I had to memorize polygon names up to 20 and roman numeral math.
There’s so many things I learned that I don’t use on a day to day. Things I can pull out of my brain but if you made me apply it, I’ll struggle for a bit, and scribble the answer on a piece of paper.
The one time the skills came in handy was when I was crushing a escape room.
I mean, broadly speaking there’s no utility to knowing the planets or their order. There’s no reason to know all the organs in the human body or the capital cities of all the states or the names of a hundred different dinosaurs or the events surrounding WW2.
But some of this stuff is just… fun to know. It gives you a knowledge base that lets you have an intelligent conversation with your peers and answers some broad existential questions about the world around you. And some of it is so foundational to your understanding of reality that - if you leave the teaching to the wrong people - you get some very ugly knock-on effects.
The guy who doesn’t know what roman numerals are is much easier to sucker into a Facebook conspiracy theory when he starts seeing them show up in a conversation between Sovereign Citizens. Knowing times-tables is helpful for that base-line mental math that keeps you from getting scammed by a shady contractor or embarrassed when you try and calculate a tip at a restaurant. Knowing your planets at least blunts some of the absurd “Iranian Drone Mothership Harasses Innocent East Coast Dipshits” headlines CNN has been spewing.
And ffs, people still write things down. Cursive is a faster way to write than print. The whole reason people keep coming back to eInk and other free-hand computer tools stems from the fact that a pen remains mightier than a keyboard in a host of cases.
These are all still important educational touchstones, even if you’re not going back to them every minute of every day.
But some of this stuff is just… fun to know.
except for the part were you go to computer science and are forced to study literature that is gonna be worth 1/3 of your final grade
Maybe you don’t enjoy the process of learning or they’re taught poorly, but it is fun later when you recognize all the references to that literature.
Memorizing multiplication tables seems weird to me to be on that list. I might not use it every single day, but it comes up often enough that I can’t understand how someone could consider it not a useful thing to know.
God forbid you learn basic skills and knowledge
Why does every bit of knowledge have to be monetized?
Aren’t you ever curious about things and want to learn them?
Imagine being an adult now and not being able to do basic math. Wouldn’t that be embarrassing?
As soon as my school said cursive was no longer mandatory, I immediately stopped using it. Garbage, pure garbage. I’ve had a job that involved coming into contact with a lot of papers where people are still choosing to write in cursive, and it is consistently the most unreadable spaghetti I have had the misfortune to look at.
By all means find ways to transcribe old works written in cursive - into print, but stop trying to revive this shitty writing style, it deserves to die.
It lent to faster writing at the time before texting was the thing. Writing out each letter without running into another takes more effort. But yeah, doctors using cursive for prescriptions is a garbage fire.
I know what cursive was for, I was there. Writing something hypothetically faster has no value when the thing written is too illegible to read, which cursive virtually always is. The fact that block writing probably is a little slower to write is exactly what makes it more consistently readable.
Ok calm down. I didn’t invent the thing. Just relaying what I know.
I learned cursive to pro actively fuck with the people that didn’t
If you do a lot of writing by hand, cursive is a lifesaver.
Nope.
Legibility > speed.
Only if you suck at cursive. Depending on how much effort I put in, both my cursive and print writing can look nice, but writing cursive causes mess stress over time. If I’m just jotting a quick note it doesn’t matter and both look like ass, but if I’m taking notes for lecture or in a D&D campaign or something like that, where I’m writing a bunch over an hour or more, I see a huge drop off in quality after a bit of time when writing print.
My mother sucks at cursive then. I have to constantly call her when I do her shopping. If it was for personal notes, it wouldn’t matter, but if you’re communicating with other people, it’s terrible.
Some people just have terrible hand writing, cursive or not
Yeah, but I don’t know anyone whose cursive is more legible than their printing.
Sure, but cursive is still faster. So legible cursive is a good compromise.
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Once you’re good at it you can have both…
Nah, even my wife’s well written cursive is hard for me to read because similar letters like n, m, u, and r tend to blemd together for me.
Hell, I find all cursive fonts difficult to read and those are extremely consistent.
No matter how you slice and dice it cursive is harder to read than print.
Not necessarily, unless you just never learned it.
Well if you’ve never learned it then you won’t be able to read it at all.
There is nothing controversial here. It’s harder to read than print. Which is exactly why you don’t see cursive fonts.
I didn’t know what rock you’ve been hiding under, but you’re wrong.
Oh wow. You got me champ. You found a font in the world.
Now tell me this. When was the last time you saw someone use cursive fonts? Read any papers lately with cursive font? Any articles using the font? Anything at all?
Nope. Didn’t think so.
I learned cursive and school and it’s still harder to read than print. Is it impossible? No. But it’s definitely not the same as reading print. It doesn’t take a genius to understand this.
Imagine not using the faster, cooler way of writing
Typing?
Signing forms is kind of a requirement in most cases. Though I K kw a lot of Der peoe just do some sort of squiggle that looks nothing like cursive or letters.
Edit: Just looking at what I typed and holy shit, what the fuck. Proofread your posts, kids.
My signature is just print but sloppier
That would include millennials also. This guy also looks more millennial age then genx.
Maybe a young millennial. Could be an older gen z.
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I don’t see why anyone would be upset about learning that.
Time learning an older form of writing that has a harder time being read, especially if the writer has sloppy handwriting, could have been used to:
- Teach computer skills when they were new technology (and still could be taught for most of the world)
- How to manage finance/a bank account
- Learning how to cook
I switched schools for high school after being in a British private school since the first grade. I was shocked at seeing anyone write in block print for the first time. Up until then I genuinely thought that cursive was the only way to hand-write and that block was reserved for little kids just learning to write.
EDIT: That school even had a calligraphy class that taught us how to write with a fountain pen. I have no idea what world they were preparing us for.
