A video joke I see often posted on Facebook shows a couple of teen-agers trying to operate a rotary desk phone without any Internet, and instructions left in cursive writing.
Obviously, the teens are baffled by the ancient technology and unable to complete their task. Videos showing them taking a stab at operating the phone are nothing short of hilarious.
But seriously, folks.
Schools in the United States no longer require students to write in cursive, abandoning the mandate in 2010. I hear tell California is trying to bring it back. But the way things have been going, cursive just might go the way of the Latin language, known by very few and done only when absolutely necessary, like signing one’s name.
Indeed, learning to write in cursive for a long time in the U.S. has been just like learning a language in elementary school. If you don’t do it or encounter it very seldom it will become just like a foreign language for today’s modern, now-a-go-go youngsters.
In other words, cursive writing may be consigned to the dust heap of history, like so many other things.
There are many old-timers like myself who believe this is a shame, that this would disconnect young people from important historical documents and enable us to find one less way to communicate effectively, which already is in trouble.
Baby Boomers most GenXers and Millennials and the Greatest Generation before us grew up with learning at an early age how to write in cursive. We even had a class in Penmanship, with which I struggled mightily because my cursive writing was very messy. When I was in sixth grade I was tasked with writing cursive using ancient pens we dipped in ink.
It’s really difficult for us oldsters, who have used cursive writing for so long almost daily, to be told now that it’s no longer relevant or necessary.
It feels to me a lot like the gist of what Charles Darwin was reported to have indicated a century and a half ago that:
“It is not the most intellectual of the species that survives; it is not the strongest that survives; but the species that survives is the one that is able best to adapt and adjust to the changing environment in which it finds itself.”
Now I find myself mired in that latter category, of being unwilling to adapt to changing conditions because, “We’ve always done it this way.”
I write most often these days on a word processor that doesn’t pass along cursive penmanship, but I take notes at meetings still using that outdated manual system.
I have to accept these changing conditions. I do indeed mourn the passing of cursive writing into irrelevancy. It’s like I’m saying good-bye to an old friend.
