Episode 129: Why Education “Experts” Hate Cursive
A fast, short explanation of why we need cursive. And why the Education Establishment hates it.
American K-12 is the land of slow and partial. Apparently our public schools are in no hurry to go anywhere. Good news: it's easy to fix this.
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MEMO TO K-12, TEACH KIDS TO READ IN FIRST GRADE
https://www.tumblr.com/edworld/732927928834441216/memo-to-k-12-teach-kids-to-read-in-first-grade-or
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Word-Wise Education
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Bruce Deitrick Price
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LET'S FIX EDUCATION: OVERVIEW
Recurring themes. Big ideas. Unifying concepts.
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LET'S FIX EDUCATION -- by -- Bruce Deitrick Price
Episode 129 Wed., Dec. 20, 2023
Why Education “Experts” Hate Cursive
Cursive has been controversial for years. The Education Establishment feels really strongly about cursive. They hate it. But why?
Here's the bottom line. There are many benefits but the main one is that children learn to read more quickly if phonics and cursive operate in tandem.
Cursive works; phonics works. They both reinforce the names, shapes and sounds of the letters. And they both teach students that the language moves left to right, one letter, syllable, or word at a time.
Most people have difficulty guessing why the Education Establishment might scorn phonics. And why the same dubious experts also campaign against cursive. These people claim to care about reading. Truth is, they seem to want less literacy, not more. Grasp that and then everything makes sense.
Think about sight-words for a minute. Look at the shapes, the general appearances of the sight-words. What do students know about the inner mechanism of the words? Nothing. Each word is a black box, which Merriam-Webster defines as ”anything that has mysterious or unknown internal functions or mechanisms.”
Without phonics, the students do not know what the objects inside the word are called or what information is communicated. They don't know about the evolution of the word, such as containing a Latin root. The sight-word is entirely a visual design that is arbitrary and meaningless.
But the Education Establishment keeps hammering on a false conclusion: cursive is useless.
One professor of education states emphatically: “Teaching cursive handwriting is an outdated waste of time.”
A second professor of education, quoted in the New York Times, is equally dogmatic: “Districts and states should not mandate the teaching of cursive. Cursive should be allowed to die.”
On the other side of the divide, phonics experts usually agree that literacy happens faster and more permanently when phonics is complemented by cursive.
When you have neither phonics nor cursive—and those are the official recommendations of our Education Establishment—you have almost no literacy at all. Apparently our professors of education want this outcome. They got rid of phonics starting in 1931. And ever since, they have waged bitter war against it, even though their own theories produce dismal results, namely, 50 million functional illiterates.
The big picture. Cursive in partnership with phonics is arguably the best way to learn to read. And there are other significant advantages beyond reading:
1) Children can read historical documents such as the Declaration of Independence. You can read your grandmother's letters. You can read anybody’s handwriting wherever you see it. You can read signatures, that's a big one. You can yourself have a beautiful signature. Look at ads in the media, you'll often see script. Many famous logos, such as Ford and Budweiser, are incomprehensible to most of our young people.
2) Even if students memorize the prescribed sight-vocabulary (Dolch, for example), they still won't learn any proper names such as George Washington, Fourth of July, Pennsylvania, Lafayette, and Potomac. Will they even know the months? In short, children can't read the simplest History or Geography.
3) Cursive introduces students to the aesthetic zone. Children are not usually trained to look at art and design. Cursive makes this happen quickly and cheaply. Encourage children to design logos from the names of family and friends; this will accelerate every other part of the child's education. (Everybody should know the pros and cons of Helvetica versus Times Roman. Everybody should have a few favorite type faces, and be able to defend their choices.
So what are today’s children learning all day? Not much. But the Kings of Chutzpah will tell us, there is simply no time to teach cursive! The schools aren’t doing much, and they shouldn’t take time off from that, should they?
When people go into teaching, you can probably assume they love education. But the educrats at the top? You should assume they love social engineering. The education part is just a nuisance. And that's why so little happens educationally in American K-12. Genuine education gets in the way of what these people care about.
Good news: it's easy to fix this. Insist that your schools teach cursive and phonics.
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I found similar article, by me, from eight years ago on American Thinker
Shows that my analysis hasn't changed in almost a decade.
And there are many fine points here not in the shorter podcast. https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2016/12/why_the_education_establishment_hates_cursive.html
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