Mom’s greeting card is unreadable to young people

A plaintive email posted on Yahoo Answers: A questioner says her mother gave her a beautiful Valentine’s Day card with a lovely written message.

She couldn’t read a word. It was written in cursive, a foreign language to young people, who were never taught the script used for a thousand years in their language, the script of their parents and grandparents. Was she missing something not learning cursive?

The answers from kids pointed out they were faced with cursive writing in letters and in school and they couldn’t read it either. Some urged the questioner to learn on his/her own.

Cursive writing was taken out of school curriculum in 2010, a dying, unnecessary art to be replaced by keyboarding.

Problem is people still use cursive. They send handwritten letters and cards to their children and grandchildren. Do they know their sentiments are in language foreign to the recipient?

Will it become, as some joke, a secret language?

Despite studies that show handwriting improves fine motor skills and enhanced the composition of ideas, schools have all but made cursive obsolete. Cut to June 2016, however, and Louisiana had passed a law requiring public and public charter schools to teach cursive writing to children from the 3rd to the12th grade. It joined 10 other states including Virginia, California and Texas where the teaching of cursive script is a state education requirement.

The fact is, cursive still exists and a generation of smart kids can’t read it.
According to Abigail Walthausen, in her article, “Learning Cursive is a Basic Right’, for instance, “running hand’ is tied to being able to sign one’s name and “the signature, the ability to sign one’s own name,” she says, “has long been an essential marker of society.” Walthausen says students understand the pedigree that it represents, “has become a status marker.”

Catherine Romano and Mike Ayers agree and in their December 2016 article in the Washington Post, “The New Status Symbol? Think Ink,’ they wrote that the disappearance of joined-up handwriting is a gentle reminder of “the status and class that being able to sign a document with more than an X” once represented.

After typewriters, handwriting became an intimate act of respect in letters and cards. Handwriting then became a choice, but now it is a choice older people can’t afford to make when communicating with the young.