Cursive has got to be the most annoying trend ever. It's not faster to write, it's not clearer to read. The introduced complexity has zero benefit whatsoever. It reminds me of one of those corporate presentations where they declare
"science _proves_ that X system is better!" Except it's not better. It's just something that the people in charge prefer.
The benefit is that it is an educational method that is cheap to administer, widely available, low risk of danger, and easy to grade if you are trying to train young students to improve their fine motor skills.
Same with cutting shapes, posing toy figures, and applying glue. I have a 12 y/o and a 7 y/o and it's amazing to see their arts and crafts development over time as they develop their fine motor skills and dexterity through a variety of teaching methods.
These fine motor skills are precursors to uplevel skills like touch typing. Why not start with touch typing? I couldn't train my daughter to touch type until her hands were big enough (around first grade, but still too small TBH). A 4 year old has an awful hard time using a mouse because they lack the motor controls to precisely manipulate with accuracy (I observed this first hand as my pre-schooler did virtual school during lockdowns -- we switched her to a touch device).
How do you develop those neuromuscular pathways? Through seemingly useless and repetitive training like correctly holding a pencil or crayon, tracing letters with precision, cutting various shapes out of card stock, coloring within the lines, etc. Kids start with gross motor skills that use their whole limbs and then slowly build fine motor skills that involve complex wrist and finger movements through practice of various techniques.
If you observe children with developmental disabilities, they have a hard time performing seemingly basic tasks like coloring within the lines. In many cases they cannot even "correctly" hold a crayon or pencil in a way that allows precise control. Their movements rely far more on gross motor skills because they cannot develop the neuro pathways required for fine control of their muscles [0].
Fine motor skills were perhaps more important in the days of manufacturing (e.g. sewing, parts assembly, wood working, metal smithing) and maybe why Asia seems to be particularly good at manufacturing and assembly of electronics. But I see such skills as still relevant today: touch typing, surgery, digital arts. Perhaps that's a contributing reason to why we don't seen as much precision manufacturing in the West even when cheap labor is available in Central and South America.
[0] My spouse was a teacher for many years, transitioned into special education first as a learning disabilities teacher consultant and now as a special services supervisor.
I learned to touch type spontaneously when I was 11. All the teachers were mystified because they seemed to think touch typing was hard to learn and hard to teach.
Maybe they find it hard to teach because they (1) don’t know how, (2) they’ve been busy miseducating people with the hidden curriculum. When my son was in school they were at the tail end of trying to teach handwriting and they sent home worksheets that were titled “Handwriting without tears” which is a confession that this is a sadistic exercise.
Like the practice of having kids “cry it out” in a crib, and the 110% support that bullies get all the way up from teachers to the school superintendent, it’s all part of a curriculum that teaches people that people in authority can abuse you all they want and there is nothing you can do about it, though people like Sam Bankman Fried get to go to private schools where people respect your autonomy and you don’t get crushed down…. They have to crush you down so that those people don’t get competition for running the world.
It surely didn't happen spontaneously. It may have in your recollection, but the fact that it took 11 years means that you accumulated 11 years of neuromuscular training first.
… and I got that neuromuscular experience despite school, not because of school. I reject the word training here because I think teachers give themselves way too much credit, a lot of what they do is "makework" that wastes time and doesn't develop any real abilities. Homeschoolers find again and again that they can get way above grade level in a fraction of the school day because the school day is mostly about waiting in line, watching the teacher discipline other kids, and such.
I did not find art class agonizing the way I found handwriting but my impression then was that there was some small group of kids, maybe 5-10%, mostly girls, who did much better than the rest of us and my belief is those same people do better quality work of that sort than the rest of us now.
Some of those activities like art and music are activities that only some people are going to really benefit from. I learned to touch type, I think, because I really wanted to and because I found working with computers to be meaningful. Had I been exposed to music in a way that engaged me I might have gotten something out of it but instead I got endless drilling with the recorder that hurt my hands and nobody told me how to reliably make more than three notes, something I figured out only decades later after I’d gotten a PhD in nonlinear mechanics enough to understand the sound generation process.
What I know about physical training is that pain (for the most part: the “burn” in weight training is helpful but twinges of pain from your tendons aren’t) is the enemy of progress and that all you get from painful training is no progress, more pain and muscular inhibition. Worse, the experience of pain causes you to get better at feeling pain. Time and time again I learned the only way to make progress was to eliminate the pain first, once I did that I’d go from years of no progress to rapid progress from day to day. Who knows how many cases of chronic pain today date back to kids in school being told to disregard pain and soldier onward through unproductive and wasteful activities?
I got a fountain pen years ago, and it almost wanted me to draw in cursive. I didn't recognize it before I got an iPad with the pen and started to use it a bit to write with, because it too wanted me to write in a connected way.
Of course an inanimate object doesn't want anything, but it felt way more natural to write connected.
On the other hand, no matter what type of pen or pencil I use, it does not feel natural to write connected, so I don't.
My conclusion based on this is that cursive is something we do, because it made sense once, but we didn't know why, so we never stopped when it no longer made sense.
There have been articles on this site in the past about cursive—basically that it was better. When we wrote with fountain pens. Once we switched to ballpoint pens, it stopped being better.
Ironically, writing with a stylus has many of the same issues as fountain pens, making cursive useful for writing on tablets.
The issues I notice: the stylus must be lifted far off the screen to deregister the touch. It’s also bad at registering where a pen down motion touches the screen if it’s in motion. Cursive writing makes the results neater.
I haven't had issues with the deregistering on either of my iPads (both first and second generation pencil) but I did notice that I started to write in cursive. Which for whatever reason the iPad cannot recognize as text.
