In 2010, Common Core standards, no longer required the teaching of cursive writing in elementary schools. Since that time, many school systems around the country have dropped cursive writing and replaced it with something of more pertinence, such as keyboarding. While on the one hand, the fact that cursive writing is no longer being taught in most public schools, seems like a good thing, since, for instance, most everything that you view in either print media or on any of your online media devices is virtually never in cursive; on the other hand though, the two most important documents in American history, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were both written in cursive. This means, that when viewing a replication of the actual document, today's youth will have great difficulty in reading: English!
While it is understandable that we live in a digital age and that we cannot teach everything to our children, the dropping of cursive writing may be a mistake, as the difficulty in obtaining decent cursive skills both of writing as well as reading is not something that is all that strenuous, and the learning of this skill has its value. For instance, although we may never read the original cursive of the Constitution, we might have a desire to read old letters from our parents or of our grandparents that were written in cursive. Also, we would probably like to develop our own signature so as to sign legal documents and the like. Additionally, in an era when native-born Americans seem only to be able to speak English and no other foreign language, it seems a shame to degenerate even further to such a degree that we can only read print characters, and not cursive.
While we can appreciate the gift of being able to effortlessly type in characters with our keyboard, so that learning good keyboard skills most definitely has value, it is a fundamental mistake if in so doing, our ability to print actual letters from our hand to a piece of paper is impacted, negatively. That is to say, if cursive writing is dead, to which virtually all cursive writing is done with physical pen onto paper, than what is to say, that at some near point in the future, that actual hand printing will too, become obsolete. It is imperative, that our children know how to form and to write their own letters and words onto a physical piece of paper. The accurate writing and formulation of these letters are critical to formulation of developing a good vocabulary, as well as leading to the proper construction of sentences and overall clear thinking. Today's word processors are very powerful and with their automatic spellchecking ability they can correct effortlessly, for the most part, each and every error that you make in the spelling of words, but while this is beneficial, it is also a crutch. Additionally, the effort of physically writing words integrates both cognitive as well as language skills into a graphic art form.
In America, it appears the days of cursive writing are pretty much dead. On a lot of levels, this is probably unfortunate, however, it's somewhat understandable because most people spend very little time either reading or writing cursive. Nonetheless, we must be careful to recognize that the skill and value of being able to accurately print and write our own characters and subsequently words and coherent sentences, must first be accomplished using a real pencil onto paper, in order to properly formulate and develop our own cognitive abilities.