Meh. I write almost exclusively in cursive because I use pens, particularly fountain pens, and it's much faster to write that way. In my experience cursive also

Meh. I write almost exclusively in cursive because I use pens, particularly fountain pens, and it's much faster to write that way. In my experience cursive also works a lot better when using styluses because the flow of the letters helps hide that 20ms lag. When I use pencils, I tend to write in block letters because I think that flow helps a lot with cursive and my personal opinion is that pencils don't give as many of the same advantages as a good ink pen and that graphite works better when done in short strokes rather than curves. It's not a useless skill. I'm happy to know cursive and I enjoy writing it, and I like the way that it looks. There is an intrinsic joy in writing in a beautiful way. It's a faster way to write. But it's certainly not a skill that anyone needs to feel obligated to learn or shamed for avoiding. I'm skeptical of claims that it improves cognitive outcomes, I'm not sure how that would be tested in the first place in a controlled way. I'm also largely unsympathetic to arguments about aesthetics, tradition, etc... Reminds me a lot of the "everyone should learn to play an instrument/do a sport/etc" arguments. Things can be good without being mandatory. Lots of stuff will improve your cognition, social skills, and character, but not every single thing that does so needs to be a requirement. ---- I kind of put cursive in the same bucket as Vim. I'm glad I know Vim, I think it's a faster way to edit text, I think that over time it becomes more intuitive even if only being used at a basic level. Practicing modal editing certainly could have cognitive benefits I suppose. And I think it's just an elegant and an aesthetically pleasing way to reason about text. But do I think people should be required to learn Vim? No, of course not. ---- I don't think it does any harm to teach stuff like this; a lot of early elementary education isn't really about the stuff that's being taught so much as it is about learning how to be taught and how to operate in group settings and how to excel at something. But I'd find it difficult to justify passing a law about or caring enough to try and mandate cursive; I'd be tempted to take those requirements and expand typing programs even more than what's currently required. Learning to type well had an immense positive impact on my life that I think is easy to quantify. In contrast, learning cursive... :shrug: I'm hard pressed to think of how my life would have been different if I never learned it, other than that I might not have become quite as snobby about pens as I am today :)