Everyone think back to grade school— second grade, specifically. This was a time in your life when crushes not-so-subtly developed and when you really started to fine-tune your reading skills. You, yes you, even reached for that thicker mystery story you thought you couldn't handle and did, quite beautifully, I might add. But for the few who actually remember their elementary school experience, second grade was the year that everything changed. This was the year you learned cursive.
I know what you're thinking: Cursive? You mean that thing I write my name in for important documents or when I'm too tired to lift my hand off of the page? Yes, that's exactly what I'm referring to. Second grade was one of the best years of my life because I learned cursive. I remember we learned a new letter every day to write in cursive, and it felt like years until we went down the alphabet enough to get to the letter "L." That was part of the reason why I went to school every day.
**Cough** Nerd! **Cough cough** Yeah, yeah, let it out now. But for me, this was a huge part of my life—it still is. I wanted to learn cursive so I could write to my Grandma in Florida and read my mom's grocery lists, because that's all she writes in (no matter how illegible). But the romantic side of me remembers that it's all I saw beautiful women in black and white films write in when they were sending letters to their soldiers overseas, or when someone was pondering a big decision and wrote in their journals. I wanted to be able to read what they were thinking or writing. It was like like a backstage pass to someone's thoughts. And now, they don't even teach it at all.
When I heard the news that schools were omitting cursive from their curriculum and including more computer classes, I thought to myself, This is the end of humanity as we know it. And no, I'm not being overly dramatic—it's the perfect amount of drama, actually. I know that computers, technology in general, are an important part of everyone's lives. Hell, I'm writing this article on my computer as I pull up a music website with just a few clicks, but where's the personal touches? Where's the effort? I wrote this, clicked a button, and people "connect" to it on another device. How can you truly connect to something electronically?
Every time I look around campus, restaurants, and libraries, people are glued to whatever quick fix they found on their phone or laptop, completely ignoring the company they have and everything else going on around them. The more I think about technology, the more I think about "The Walking Dead" and how people are looking more and more like the zombies on that show, which is why cursive should be kept in school's curriculum, not thrown out like last year's iPhone.
Cursive takes effort, a lot of it. It can be difficult to read if it's not done slowly and properly, but that's the beauty of it. It takes effort and mental focus that absolutely none of the young adults today have. It's not a worthless thing to learn, either. It shows you take pride in what you have to say and you're willing to take the time to translate that onto paper. Paper, for example, that our country was founded on and, to this day, remains as a staple for our government. You know, that little thing called the Constitution?
In case you forgot, the Constitution was written in cursive, as was the Declaration of Independence. Could you imagine if people weren't taught cursive and, therefore, couldn't read the cursive that the founding documents of our country were written in? And I know the Constitution was translated to print on dozens of websites, but what about for all the little kids that take class trips and field trips to go see our country's history and they think that it's a waste of a trip because they can't read our founding documents; documents that hundreds of thousands of people died for? If that thought doesn't scare people, even a little bit, then I'm starting to question your sanity.
Cursive isn't a waste of time, just like technology and modern medicine aren't, but it's more than just a filler in the classroom. It's a different, more personal way to connect to people and our history. Cursive shouldn't be thrown out of the window; it should be properly taught in schools. Even if people choose not to continue with it, that's their choice, but don't take that choice away from the thousands of students who don't even get a say. As it says in Amendment X of our Bill of Rights: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people." The people are speaking, and they want their cursive back.
