A Whole Lotta Nothing Matt Haughey’s Personal Blog

Decursivication (new word)

[di-kur-siv-fi-key-shuhn] noun. The process of losing one’s penmanship, thanks to automatic billing and an increasingly electronic world. Bob attributed his chicken scratch-like note writing to the process of decursivication.

I’ve heard that most schools do not each cursive writing anymore.

I know they don’t in my son’s elementary school here in So Cal.

I tried my hand at cursive writing at school and failed miserably at it. Chicken scratch style script writing getting worse every day thanks to computers FTW.

Yeah, my penmanship was never good and it’s gotten worse. Shame, though: I like writing with a fountain pen, and I’ve gotten a decent one, but I just never need to write much on paper anymore.

First goes the cursive in favor of printing. Then the printing in favor of typing–typing in favor of keyboarding–next I expect I’ll resort to some sort of voice recognition program, just before I begin drooling uncontrolably.

I’m with Vidiot. The big downside of decursivication is that attempts to write in pen for any long stretch of time causes hand-aches.

Sure enough, there’s a rapidly growing trend for elementary schools to stop teaching cursive writing as a mandatory part of their curriculum to make more time for technology training, foreign languages, and, in particular, materials needed to pass standardized tests.

I’ve read that even within the few schools where handwriting is still taught, it’s generally dropped from their curriculum after the 3rd grade. Without any incentive to keep up the practice, most kids quickly abandon the struggle to continue developing handwriting skills in favor of keyboarding - which most have been doing since kindergarten.

To me, this is symptomatic of the even more disturbing trend of pushing technology upon children at such an early age. Kids need time to just be kids and to learn to thrive in the physical world before being thrusted headlong into the inescapable cyber-world.