My high school senior nephew cannot read or write cursive

[Chiquitita]

185. Do you like art? For me it is like air and water...it sustains life.

Experimenting with handwriting in school was that life for me. It was not finger pushing a button and seeing a pre-fab and consistent "ABC" in different fonts appear-- always mechanically reproduced exactly the same. It was shaping a line of "g, g, g's" and marveling that each was slightly different: attention to detail to slight differences and to the possibility of creating a new way of writing "g"! It was the pen, the texture, the sound of it. It absorbed me in concentration.

Handwriting was freeing, personal, all mine. Learning rules and breaking them was moment of respite from "line up and shut up" obedience to "real world" applications (read: hey kid, submit to just being a cog in the machine, and dammit, labor efficiently to produce quantifiable monetary profit for someone smarter or more powerful than you).

Children have different interests, and some second graders will find their hearts sing and their creativity unleashed when they are taught such things. YOU have used cursive ZERO times because it isn't important to YOU and you have other interests. You were able to discover that. I have used cursive DAILY over to journal and it is a great pleasure to me, a quality of life issue. How my handwriting has changed over the 30 years I've been doing it, and day to day, because of mood, context, pen, fascinates me and makes me happy. I know I am not alone. Handwriting, however it is done, communicates more than just words with its forms.

I also study poetry and read old manuscripts for my work, some from the 15th and 16th century, so paleography is of deep interest to me. Maybe if my school hadn't offered cursive, I never would have discovered that and my soul would have been deadened and reduced to "useful" skills, or skills deemed useful by a majority of people who don't see beauty the same way I do.

We should be broadening our young kids' learning experiences and varying them, so they can choose. We need learning diversity just as we need biodiversity.