![]() ![]() In the 1950s and ’60s, many Americans worried that young people were being allowed to ignore society’s rules entirely too much. Whether in second or third grade, there would be no escaping the drills and rules. For decades, the controversy focused narrowly on when to make the print-to-cursive transition. Those educators saw no need for children to ever learn cursive, but most Americans felt otherwise. They introduced a new font that children could master more easily and at earlier ages. In the 1920s, a group of progressive educators had the novel idea that handwriting instruction should be about learning how to express oneself on paper. To hear many Americans talk about it, you might think the decline of cursive in our schools is handicapping, even endangering, our children. Most boosters of cursive don’t go down that road, but we need to grasp what drives nostalgia and how it can get in the way of understanding what kind of handwriting instruction makes sense today. ![]() One commenter on a Christian home-schooling blog warned in 2017 that “atheists do NOT want cursive taught,” arguing that if people could read “our historical legal documents,” they would see that “America was, is and will forever be a Christian nation.” Educational standards that don’t require cursive to be taught are out to bury that truth, she continued, the better to promote “the LGBTQ lifestyle and the Muslim religion.” Responding to the wave of cursive legislation, “The Dixie Diva,” a column published in newspapers in the South, equated cursive with everything “civilized and beautiful” and rued that if we can’t read handwritten historical documents, then we “have been lost to a world of family and American history.” Those conservative undertones can turn very dark. ![]()
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