but that came at least partly from years of working up mechanical drawings and writing in and on places where it was imperative for meaning to be clear (electrical load center directories, etc.). I learned cursive in 2nd grade like everybody else I knew; I just stopped using it somewhere along the line because I found could print faster. This appears to be not so much an aberration as it is the way of the world these days.
But I disagree with Glenn Reynolds when he says
Is it a loss that people don't have beautiful cursive? In the abstract, maybe, but kids have lots of more important stuff to learn.
I've said since the early '90s that we are making a mistake introducing children to the computer (and thus the typewriter keyboard) so early. We didn't learn to type until 8th grade, though admittedly, we didn't have PCs back in 1972.
At the same time, I think the quality of education we got was better when we were forced to read from books, write on paper, and figure in our heads. These are basic skills that are being neglected today as we spend billions of dollars retrofitting elementary school classrooms with computers.
There may be some things at which computers are better than humans, but I don't think elementary education is one of them. I think we let grade school kids interact far too much with non-human instruction, and I think it has a lot to do with why kids today are the way they are -- little anti-social assholes if you see what I'm seeing.
Between too much computer time and too much structured play time, I think we're raising a generation of incipient nervous breakdowns, and call me selfish, but I'd really rather it wasn't the generation that will be running my senior living community -- and by extension, the country -- when I'm old.
You want a radical plan for education reform? Here's one: No computers in elementary schools. Make the little shits learn to read, write, and cipher before they are allowed to let the computer do it for them. And by extension, make teachers TEACH instead of leaving it to the inhuman silicon chip.
And make kids learn Palmer Method (or whatever the hell method is used these days) cursive. It's a lesson in discipline more than anything else, and God knows kids today need discipline.
