• AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppet@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    You’re just not old enough. Cursive was everywhere when I was a kid. They should still teach it to children because children learn language and writing easier than adults do. We should be able to read cursive. It is part of our language, and our history. Every old document is written in cursive. We shouldn’t end up with a society that can’t even read its original Constitution. That’s just Idiocracy.

    • mhague@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      I grew up in a house with a rotary phone and a meticulously maintained phone book (written in cursive.) If I’m too young to have been able to reliable hone my cursive-parsing skills, what can we expect of younger generations?

      The Flynn effect suggests people are generally getting smarter, remembering things better, etc. Something is happening to cause younger generations to be generally better than their ancestors. IQ scores have their problems but it’s still a hopeful sign.

      • AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppet@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        Different circles I guess then. Everyone I knew wrote in cursive when I was younger. Regarding your intelligence comment, it’s not an intelligence issue, just an education and exposure issue. Learning cursive is easier than learning to write all-together, but if you’re never taught, and you’re not exposed to it, then you’re probably not going to learn it. It’s such a simple thing to learn that I don’t understand the aversion everyone on this thread has towards it. It’s pretty nice when you have to write a lot of text, like taking notes or journaling.

        • Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
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          11 months ago

          The aversion in my case comes from seeing time being wasted on that when teachers could use it to teach much more useful things or making sure that kids learned everything else they’ve been taught.

    • ricecake@sh.itjust.works
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      11 months ago

      Language changes. Teaching an entire script to be able to read translated documents when there are practical skills that could be taught instead is silly.

      We don’t teach old English anymore, even though there’s a huge amount of our cultural history contained in it.
      We don’t even teach people about the eras when we used to use “f” in place if “s”, and that’s right in the middle of the constitution.

      Can you read the original magna carta? America would not be unique amongst English speaking nations in having issues dealing with language drift.