Teaching cursive and other neglected skills
It's baffling that schools no longer require certain courses to graduate.
Originally published in the Moultrie News.
Some states are trying to put cursive back in schools. My son is in high school and still can’t sign his name in cursive, so I think this is good. But will it take away from time devoted to other subjects?
Well, sure. School is a zero-sum game. There are only 180 days, so every minute you’re doing one thing is a minute you’re not doing another. If you want to teach cursive, you’ll have to take away something.
In this case, that’s not a big deal. We taught cursive for years without a problem (many still do). Goodness knows, when you look at contemporary learning standards, there’s a lot of fat that can be cut out, and teaching kids cursive is a worthwhile venture.
In addition to enabling kids to put their John Hancock on a form without it looking weird, it helps them take notes at a quicker pace, read historical documents, and decipher notes and memos. All of those are important skills.
Of course, it’s fair to question what, exactly, they are more important than. While it’s easy to find useless lessons to toss, there are a number of crucial communication skills that are still on the outside looking in. We might want to make time for them, too.
One such skill that ought to smack us in the face is keyboarding because, to a large degree, it’s the reason cursive got dumped in the first place. It has overtaken cursive in both frequency and utility. How often at work do you use a keyboard versus a fountain pen? How many emails do you send versus handwritten letters? The ratio probably isn’t close.
Even in school, kids type all the time. They write essays, type projects, answer questions, and do research, all using school-issued laptops.
Isn’t it baffling, then, that many states don’t require a keyboarding proficiency course to graduate? Sure, there might be some keyboarding standards thrown here and there, and there are usually requirements for computer science courses (where kids can learn a flurry of skills that will be obsolete by the time they enter the workforce). But a keyboarding course with the goal of optimal finger placement and typing 30 words per minute? Nope.
Isn’t it even more baffling that years ago keyboarding was required? Entire school labs were filled with typewriters. Every child knew the significance of “Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country.”
We taught this skill even though the average adult barely touched a typewriter. Now, of course, we use keyboards all the time, but the course requirement has vanished. What’s going on here?
Teaching kids content is vital, but so is teaching them to manage their tools efficiently. You wouldn’t give a kid a car without teaching him how to use the gear shift and steering wheel, would you? Giving kids laptops without teaching them keyboarding is just as goofy.
But the list of communication oversights hardly stops there. What about teaching spelling rules? What about elocution skills? And what about teaching non-English speakers to understand English?
So, yes to cursive, but also yes to priorities: there are communication skills even more crucial than cursive that are withering on the vine. Perhaps it’s time to put them all back on the table.
Read the original column here.