Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by mrhektor 1401 days ago
Interestingly, I think the reason is that cursive has been dropped from the US curriculum since 2013: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20171108-the-uncertain-fu...
4 comments

Good riddance. I remember being forced to do this as a kid and knowing full well it was a waste of time and that my life would be spent with keyboards. The only time ive ever "needed" it was exactly once to write that paragraph they make you reproduce in cursive for the SAT, which makes no sense in the first place, as though the weight carried by an attestation is modulated by the font it's rendered in.

Now i feel bad for my colleagues who were diligent students and learned cursive. They are stuck with handwriting that becomes increasingly illegible to the general population with every passing year. The only benefit it offers is being marginally faster than printing, but still vastly slower than typing. People are so used to reading print that i would argue cursive is becoming regarded as somewhat unprofessional.

> handwriting that becomes increasingly illegible to the general population

Are younger people really not able to read cursive? I find that hard to believe; it's still the same letters.

Plenty of the letters are different enough, especially in the middle of a word. IMO, messy cursive is WAY harder to read than messy print writing.
For what’s it’s worth my Japanese friends can’t read cursive.
Weirdly enough, I went through school before then and learned cursive and I only use it on receipts and the occasional bank check. It has little to do with cursive being taught and more to do with cursive, and handwriting in general, being irrelevant.
You're probably right, besides aesthetic value, writing on paper has little utility left
Faster and with better retentIon when taking notes in meetings (or classes).
Same here! And I used a typewriter for my essays at university. These days if I scribble things down its just a scrawl (not really printing or cursive to be honest).
Good. We no longer use ink pens which make it important to avoid lifting pen from paper, so block lettering is more legible and should be what is taught.

Sure, we type often and so write much less than we used to, but most of us still write on occasion, so writing must still be taught.

I think this is basically mixing up cause and effect. Cursive has been dropped from the curriculum because no one writes in cursive anymore.