[XorNot]

Teaching cursive seems like a weirdly American obsession, because during school in Australia it just...wasn't a thing. Like teachers did take you through what "running writing" was, but we were never required to actually master it the accomplishments level was just "can you write? Good let's move on to how sentences are structured".

[tdeck]

It's also fun because every few decades there's a new fad in school penmanship so each generation learns a different cuesive and it's all a mess.

I had one teacher who wrote in cursive in University, and her penmanship seemed pretty good. But I always struggled to read it. We are just not used to seeing cursive writing on a daily basis.

[IAmBroom]

How old are you? The rare teachers I remember writing in cursive were very readable.

[tdeck]

I'm in my early 30s so I never got used to reading it.

[IAmBroom]

Fascinating! Can anyone from other countries chime in?

[dranudin]

For me, in Germany, it was always cursive from the beginning to the end of school. We learned to write in the first class of elementary school. I still only write cursive and cannot write any other style, by hand. And only with a fountain pen. The style I was taught is called "Lateinische Ausgangsschrift". At a catholic elementary school in NRW. If you are interested here is an overview of the different cursive styles: https://www.schulschriften.de/html/schreibschrift.html

[siva7]

I'm now really confused. I've also been taught this type in german elementary school. But since after school cursive was thought of as children / school handwriting and not something adults should use in professional settings. Also the use of fountain pents was considered childish.

[dranudin]

Well, I was never taught otherwise. However lots of the other kids later in high school had developed another way of writing. So me writing cursive, now, as a grown man, is a little strange. I still write with the fountain pen, because it is much nicer to write. You need almost no pressure and that is good for your fingers, if you need to write for a longer time.

[IAmBroom]

Fascinating! So, you weren't ever taught to print?

[lo_zamoyski]

In Poland, children are likewise taught cursive from the get go when they are taught to write. There is no initial block letter stage.

[dranudin]

No never. They taught us some type of preletters in cursive, in kindergarden, as a stepping stone to real cursive. We never wrote print in elementary school. However, the kindergarden and elementary school were catholic institutions. Most probably they are more conservative than the average in the country.

[janfoeh]

Different German: it is hazy, but I believe I started out with block/print letters in pre-school, and then "graduated" in some early class to cursive.

Print was more seen as a stepping stone, a teaching aide, something to be eventually superseded.

[1718627440]

I find the discussion very weird. I'm from Germany, cursive is taught in class two. There were people in class who never got it, but mostly one or two. I don't get how people can stand writing in printing letters, doesn't it take too much time to essentially stop writing after each letter?

[nancyminusone]

It takes too much time to write, period. I'm not really interested in incremental improvements in my handwriting when I can already type an order of magnitude faster.

[kleiba]

Germany consists of 16 states, and they all have different school systems. Where I live, children are not taught cursive at all.

[1718627440]

I switched from Thuringia to Saxony and have younger siblings that were in Saxony and they don't differ in that regard. I thought "Schulausgangsschrift" was mandatory. Where do you went to school? What did you do in class two in German lessons? This was basically the main thing we learned there (I think).

[kleiba]

I didn't go to school in Germany, but my kids do/did. They learn something that is called "Grundschrift" (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grundschrift).

[1718627440]

That's interesting. That Wikipedia article claims, that the idea is in fact not to not get the children to use cursive, but let them develop their own cursive. So they are still supposed to write in cursive eventually.

[nuancebydefault]

Belgium: the only handwriting i can do properly is cursive (each word is a connected string of curly letters). I often cheated on the capitals because they are a bit grandose curly in cursive. We wrote notebooks full with cursive in different languages, that's how most languages were thought. My 12yo kid was thought exactly the same hand writing but he has to write less because the usage of fill-in books in stead of empty notebooks.

[merlynkline]

UK: I find all this fascination with "cursive" very odd. I was taught to write indivdual block letters before and in the first year of school, and then like every other pupil, was excited to move on to "joined up" writing, which was (is) very similar, with the letters having small extensions to link them to the adjoining letters in a word, thereby making writing much faster. The way I was taught to write block letters was cleary designed to lead to this - there really wasn't much difference. Reading and writing joined up letters seems pretty normal to me and to my kids.

My handwriting was, and still is, pretty awful but I soon learned to argue that the legibility of one's handwriting is in inverse proportion to one's intelligence, citing doctors as evidence and positing that higher intelligence leads to faster thinking leads to faster writing leads to decreased legibility. Never really had any problems in school (or since) and I will note that when I left secondary education my school still did not have a computer, even in the admin offices. My kids' experience has been very different but with similar outcomes in this regard.

[asimpletune]

Writing in cursive is common in Italy, and signatures are important, must be legible, and will be scrutinized.

[IAmBroom]

Wow. That last sentence.

But then again, Italy has something of a Catholic grade school mentality, but with more gelato and better shoes. /s (Sort of - do they still have a mandatory tax supporting the Vatican?)