Death of Cursive

AI Generated Image

A couple weeks back, the topic of cursive writing was brought up twice in one week. One of the blogs I read mentioned it in passing in a blog post and then later, a blog reader mentioned it in a comment on one of my blog posts which had a bit about using AI to transcribe cursive. All this reminded me that I have fully changed my thoughts on teaching cursive writing in school in the matter of just a year or two.

A year ago, I felt that school not teaching cursive writing anymore was a travesty of a major order. We were going to bring up an entire generation of kids who couldn't read documents of the past or even present as there are many who still write in cursive daily. I am one of those people. But a thing called Artificial Intelligence started making a splash and now I can't think of a good excuse to continue teaching kids cursive writing.

The biggest reason for my changed viewpoint is AI itself which can easily ready cursive writing and spit it out in typed English if you want or Japanese characters too. I have no doubt that soon, if not already, one can just pull out their computer masquerading as a cellphone and point it at any document and it will translate whatever you are looking at it real time into whatever format you desire. Quickly teaching out kids to write and read cursive seems much the same as teaching them to write and read Latin, which our schools used to do and no longer do. It sort of seems pointless unless you want to be a scholar who studies Latin... or cursive writing.

Another reason has been just watching my kids go through life. When I grew up, writing was such an integral part of it but now not so much. I rarely see my kids write anything anymore. Their preference is to type or merely send some sort of emoji character through their personal computer masquerading as a cellphone. My eldest, a chip off the old block, has been keeping a journal for maybe the last year and does write in it but I don't see it. She also prefers print to cursive which she rarely is forced to read unless trying to read something I write to her. Other than that, all her notes that she takes in college is all done digitally. Gone are the days of notebooks full of notes that I churned out in college. My youngest likely also writes occasionally and has the most beautiful cursive writing I have ever seen (she learned cursive only because she attended a private Catholic elementary school instead of our local public school that doesn't teach it) but rarely applies it to anything other than signing her name on her homework. Any assignments requiring writing sentences is done on computers and various programs.

So in the last year, I have done a one-eighty on my beliefs of this subject. Cursive writing is just another dead language like Latin and Sanskrit. I'll miss it but the world will continue on without it long after this reader and writer of cursive is gone and buried.