Everything aside, I do love the idea of adding cursive and calligraphy to art classes.

I remember how excited I was to learn how to write in cursive script, it made me feel so grown up! Plus I could then read old letters and documents that had been impossible for me to decipher before then.

My mother wrote her journal entries in Pitman's shorthand. It used to drive my father crazy because he couldn't read it. Very useful skill to have.

I will say, I wasn't good at writing until I learned cursive.  Once I did, I wrote very quickly and very well.  So whatever its historical origins and frenchiness, I view cursive as an accommodation option.

I wish I'd been taught some form of shorthand, would have made note taking in college a lot easier.

I wasn't taught cursive because they phased it out literally a year before I got to that point in the curriculum and my signature is nonsense. I think not being taught cursive (especially when the curriculum had kinda half arsed teaching writing properly in anticipation of it) hurt my ability to write. I've been meaning to teach myself cursive so that writing is less painful and slow when I need to do it physically (leftie), but I shouldn't have to teach myself in adulthood. It should have been covered in school like it was intended to before they suddenly dropped it from the curriculum.

I taught myself cursive, and I am pretty good at it and write exclusively in various cursive scripts (different fonts for the different languages I speak) cursive is way faster for me.

My autistic child struggles with writing in block print, but can manage cursive better. 🤷‍♂️ brains are weird.

Hrmph.  My own reasoning was that it is essential for rapidly taking paper notes — it’s interesting that that wasn’t part of the reasoning given at the beginning of the video.  The advent of ubiquitous keyboards does make that less useful, however, I find myself in situations where writing in cursive is still faster — especially when I need illustrations in notes.

1) I was in grade school in the 1970s, when we were required to write our school work in cursive. 2) I have cerebral palsy, and my poor fine motor skills are baked into my brain. 3) In fourth grade, I was personally forbidden to write in cursive after neither the teacher, nor I were able to read my handwriting on a spelling test.

Teaching cursive in art class is brilliant!

We've gone back to teaching cursive for a few reasons - many secondary teachers are going back to testing students with paper and pencil to avoid ai cheating, and cursive is faster. But something that surprised me, is that the kids who didn't get cursive were super sad about it and asked me to teach them in 6th grade. They wanted to be able to read their parent's writing. I do think it will go extinct, but I've learned not to underestimate the power of nostalgia in education choices - we still do a lot of things that don't really make sense, and when we try to change them, there is a lot of push back by parents, even ones who hated school. 🤷🏻‍♀️. My vote is to teach every student sign language, and singing. Both have numerous positives besides the obvious.

Fun fact-Doctor cursive is actually an entirely different writing system!

Usually their signature specifically is an unholy mash of standard cursive and doctor script but iirc doctor script was created for the multiple purposes of jotting down patient information faster, makeing medical documents illegible to the layman, and reducing the amount of space the information takes up on paper!

I remember learning cursive in 5th grade and being told to stop writing it in 6th because of legibility. I have ended up with a mixed way of writing when I do handwrite anything.

I'm an old of sorts (60), but I was not taught "cursive". I was taught to write by hand. Period.
Same thing. It is also very useful for being able to read what people wrote, every day, before the computer.
What I really don't understand is this compulsion in the US to get rid, destroy, erase the old for the shiny new especially when it requires less effort. The only thing left is convenience, yes, but also laziness and ignorance.
Not a good path.

When I learned cursive, I thought all of the capitals were weird (especially Q). I mostly just use block letters for caps, and I think a lot of other people do as well.

I'm a secondary English and History teacher, who used to think the same thing. Until I realized that not learning to write cursive has been detrimental to both literacy and access to text variety (primary sources, letters from Grandma, annotation, doctor's notes, paper communication with people from countries where cursive is primary and printing secondary) in recent and current student generations. And then considered that it costs nothing but practice in perseverance and exercise of mental and manual muscle, while building patience, problem solving, and fluidity of thinking skills (stronger retention and understanding are gained via tactile notetaking,  for example, and cursive is the most expeditious way to do that...not to mention that schools and post secondary institutions are increasingly returning to on-paper supervised essay writing, due to AI, and doing that in cursive is much easier and faster than printing).

...Then there are the years' worth of kids en masse expressing that they wish they could a) write and b) read cursive, and that they find it embarrassing that they can't.

There is nothing lost by teaching cursive. People got hold of the idea that it was being replaced by tech and ran with that idea before fully thinking it through because it's difficult and boring to learn and teach. Discomfort should not be a deterrent to learning.

I'm on team cursive on this one. It's far more aesthetically pleasing and I personally find it easier and faster to write in than block letters (though I haven't used block letters since I learned cursive in Kindergarten). It still gets taught here in Brazil a lot too albeit teachers aren't as strict with it anymore, back in my school days some teachers would only accept cursive in their assignments and tests. Which I do think is a bit too far, but cursive shouldn't be left behind in my opinion.

although i have enjoyed re-learning cursive as an adult, the thing i appreciated about learning it as a child was that this then meant i could READ it - which 100% is useful or we will lose access to years of history. Before learning cursive i couldn't read the letters my grandparents' letters sent to me. (addendum: no, I would not have been able to read them before learning cursive; of course their cursive wasn't identical to what we'd learned in school but it was close enough that their handwriting went from looking like a different language to me, to being easy to puzzle out. That said, at my school board we had to learn it for a short time, but that didn't mean we had to use it to write full assignments for years or anything, and I agree there's not that much reason to force children to use it for writing assignments these days - we had a unit on it, with some practice time, but we were always allowed to write our assignments however we liked with the priority simply being legibility, which makes sense to me. Nevertheless, I'm glad that I was exposed to it early since even if you don't end up reading old letters, it's basically like learning a different font, which is a skill you could extrapolate to be able to parse different fonts and handwriting instead of learning that every letter MUST look the same every time - in my opinion, simply learning another script is why so many of us develop personalized handwriting later on and use cursive-printing, and it's those skills to read on version of cursive that we've extrapolated to be able to read slightly different scripts. I was not able to read any form of cursive before being taught how to write it, but now I can extrapolate many variations of letters, since I have a wider base of knowledge to extrapolate from.

It's simply much easier to put together pattern recognition after learning 2 versions of something than only 1 of something. Similar to why learning a second language helps you to understand all language better, or how it's very useful to expose kids to English media with different accents early, so that they can understand a wider variety of people without growing up to perceive different accents as weird or annoying or incorrect.

I don't believe it's a thing where I think we should all be graded on how good we are at it, and I think the priority in school handwriting should simply be legibility - but there are a great many things that children benefit from being exposed to it in a learning environment for some period of time that fall outside of what belongs on standardized testing.

(Most of my friends have developped handwriting that is some form of "cursive printing" which is much faster and more practical than regular printing, and I personally believe this stems from most of us having learned cursive but not fully adopting it at speed, and coming up with our own combinations; if we'd never learned cursive, our personal handwriting may have ended up quite different and/or slower. So I think that knowing all of the things just comes in handy for development in a variety of ways.)

The only thing I don't get, is why we teach kids cursive, but not sign language or braile. Sign especially helps simplify words, to have a more visual representation of the word, it can also be used at a distance. Cursive has it's uses, but so does braile and sign. I wear glasses, and I sometimes wonder if I grew up, where I wouldve been taught braille, as well as print, would I have more options and would brailling tools be cheaper because everyone was using them. Currently braille can't even benefit blind people in smaller towns, because of the lack of support in public schools. Not every family wants to send their kid to a special school, or there's not one close enough.

I'm autistic, so learning cursive was a bit of a difficult thing initially, because we had to write some stuff in cursive. Like part of the assignment was to write a paragraph in cursive. It wasn't the writing in cursive that was difficult for me, it was the switch. And so I just took up writing in cursive constantly. Cut to me moving to Iowa for 6th grade, and no kids can read cursive. It was really frustrating having to write in print if I had to share notes for a group project, but I managed. Another aspect is that I have a condition that causes joint pain, so writing in print for extended amounts of time can irritate my wrist bc of the lifting of a pencil, and cursive is less intensive. It's also why I almost always write with a pen (preferably gel or even fountain), bc you need virtually no pressure to write, compared to pencils and regular degular pens.

Now I write in a hybrid, largely because I do tattoos in a scrawled out print style, and so it sorta melded with my cursive. I kinda just naturally flow in and out of it kinda at random. Now that I'm 21, I actually created my own shorthand system, to make writing even faster.