• @Tavarin@lemmy.ca
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    41 year ago

    Because there’s lots of old documents and letters written in cursive, so it’s a useful skill for anyone interested in history.

    • Encrypt-Keeper
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      11 year ago

      Any historically significant document has been / will be transcribed so it’s not so much “useful” as it is a niche “novelty.” That would certainly make it a fun learn for history geeks who want to read historical documents in their original form, however that doesn’t make it a very practical skill to teach the majority of school students across the country.

      • @Tavarin@lemmy.ca
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        11 year ago

        Being able to read my not-transcribed great-grandmothers letters to my mom is a nice perk of being able to read cursive. And it’s really not hard to learn, and takes little class time.

        • Encrypt-Keeper
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          1 year ago

          I don’t think it’d be prudent to add cursive to standard curriculums across the nation so that the nations children can read your great-grandmothers letters to your mom. That’s a good case for an extracurricular lesson or two perhaps, for you personally.

          • @Tavarin@lemmy.ca
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            11 year ago

            Yeah, cause I’m the only person out there with ancestors.

            Are you being purposefully dumb?

            • Encrypt-Keeper
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              1 year ago

              Of all the challenges our education system needs to improve on, from basic financial literacy to appropriate and sex and health education, your suggestion is to take up valuable classroom time that’s in short supply as it is to teach kids across the nation to be able to read their great grand parents love notes that may or may not exist? If we’re throwing the word dumb around…

              Maybe if you personally have a treasure trove of ancient ancestor love notes that you need to be able to read so badly, you could engage in extracurricular cursive learning? And save our nations children’s valuable class time for something that’s more applicable to their daily life than one niche use case?

              • @Tavarin@lemmy.ca
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                11 year ago

                You are massively overestimation how much time it takes to learn cursive.

                Also I learned cursive in first grade, when classes on basic financial literacy and sex education are entirely useless.

                You really are just being dumb. Learning cursive is a useful skill, and takes almost no class time at an age when advanced subjects will just be forgotten or not at all understood.

                • Encrypt-Keeper
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                  11 year ago

                  You are massively overestimating how useful of a skill cursive is. The only use case you could come up with was “reading ancient family letters” as if that warrants literally any time in the US education system.

                  What you don’t seem to understand is that we used to teach cursive in school. It was determined that reading great grand dad’s love letter to great grand mom was not useful enough to continue teaching it. We have adults today who never learned cursive and objectively speaking absolutely nothing of value was lost. So if you want to make the case that it’s worth teaching again you’re going to have to come up with a whole host of much better reasons. There are many things that take varying levels of time and effort to teach in schools of all grade levels, and I don’t think cursive can beat out any of them. American society as a whole disagrees with your entire premise and I’m inclined to agree with them.

                  • @Tavarin@lemmy.ca
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                    11 year ago

                    And what other skills can we effectively teach six year olds that we aren’t already teaching them at that age? Skills they can actually understand and remember.

                    And it’s being able to read any historical documents, family letters are just one example I gave. And being able to read documents yourself means you either transcribe it yourself, or verify others transcriptions. If no one can read cursive, you can;t trust the accuracy of previous transcriptions.

                    So yeah, it’s still somewhat useful, and a lot more useful than most things we can get 6 year olds to remember.

                    Man, you are dying on dumb hill here.