North Carolina’s House of Representatives recently passed a bill requiring schools to teach students their multiplication tables and how to write in cursive. I can’t say I agree with this.
Apparently cursive is considered in danger of being a lost art. I say it let it become one. Why do we need to know this anymore. Very few, and I mean few, ever write in cursive after they learn it grade school. We are becoming a more digital society by the second. Every time I write a note to myself I write it on an app on my phone.
Instead of wasting students time writing in a dying and pointless style, why not teach them to type. If I was taught how to type instead of writing cursive maybe I wouldn’t still be using the hunt and peck method. In the time it wrote this paragraph Steven King just wrote a new book, and James Patterson got someone to write one for him.
One of the reasons I’ve heard that kids need to learn how to write cursive is that no one will be able to read things written that way anymore. Like suddenly documents that were written in cursive will suddenly become unreadable and no one will ever know what it said. That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard (with the exception of being told that people watched Jersey Shore). There are people that can read hieroglyphics, you are going to tell me no one will be able to decipher cursive writing?
The math part makes sense. Yeah, we can all use calculators now. Every phone in the world, which is carried by every person in the world, has it built into it now. But math is something we have to use all the time. Perhaps if we right math better, we wouldn’t all have so much credit card debt.
As we are now in a world where we all have access to world knowledge at our fingertips at all times thanks to Wikipedia and smartphones, I can’t help but wonder if we should change the way we teach. Instead of teaching facts maybe we should teach now common sense and life lessons. Or maybe not. Perhaps we need suckers in this world, to make people like me feel better about ourselves.
