Indianapolis Star
Schools cut back time to teach handwriting
August 29, 2009
Brownsburg — Third-graders can expect a scaled-down cursive lesson this year, leaving more time to hone their keyboarding skills.
A letter distributed to parents this week said some of the instructional time previously dedicated to cursive writing will be used to teach computer keyboarding.
“It is clear to us that cursive is becoming more obsolete,” said Donna Petraits, the district’s director of communications. “We are hearing equal amounts of praise and criticism on this decision, which we fully expected.”
The district will not completely cut cursive out of the curriculum. They plan to curb it back, teaching students only how to write their name and how to read it.
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In grade school, there were two subjects this writer received grades of A in. And only two: Penmanship and Art. I believe it was in second grade that we learned to write in Cursive. It was faster than first-grade Print writing, and overwhelmingly lovelier. [As an aside: as a Sophomore in Catholic high school I was the only boy in Typing class. I miss that Remington Rand typewriter with it's resistance against pressing the keys and the loud clicking sound. By the way by the end of the course, I was the fastest typist in class at 80 words per minute. Today's computer keyboard is too quiet along with so weak a pressure against the fingers, I find myself down to maybe 40 WPA.]
Below is an example of my own penmanship, written some 25 years ago when I was around 35 years old. At that time I did not even own a typewriter, so anything I wrote had to be written the way I still write today — in Cursive. My print writing is, although excellent in first grade, now difficult for me the few times I’m made to write that way on a form, etc.
I truly hate to see Cursive writing go the way of the “dead language”, Latin.