Being well into my eighth decade, paying attention to what goes on in elementary school hasn’t been high on my list … except when sick insanity like kindergarteners being subjected to Drag Queen Hour hits the news. That induces some reflexive swearing about the slime responsible.
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Of course, my lack of elementary awareness means that I have no clue when supposed teachers stopped teaching cursive writing. Clearly, however, it was quite some time ago.
How do I know that?
From the difficulty my wife encountered a couple years ago trying to get a cashier’s check from the bank. The bank teller — likely in his 20s — had no clue whatsoever what my wife had written regarding who the check was for and where they lived. And my wife has beautiful handwriting. Since that repeated the next time with a female teller, printing such information is now the rule.
As one might suspect for someone my age, not all that many memories remain from my own early school years. Nonetheless, I can still visualize, with absolute clarity, the cursive alphabet — that included every upper- and lower-case letter — above the blackboard in what I think was my second grade classroom. Perhaps it was first or third, but regardless, the perfect letters on lined paper are crystal clear.
And there is a potential reason a few such things from the late 1940s, early 1950s are still wedged in my head today. On the night of February 7, 1970, I watched the buildings burn where K–10 of my education occurred. Vietnam War protestors torched Old Main on the campus of what is today the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. Having just returned from Vietnam combat a few months earlier, there was no question as to the low-life scumbags responsible.
Lots of my childhood played out in those flames up the hill from where I stood. The K–6 classrooms were in the west wing of Old Main which burned first, and in the frigid night air, I pondered each of those years, one by one, as the flames consumed them. Thus, that could help explain why the cursive alphabet has stuck with me all these years.
But what in the world would have gotten penmanship, a.k.a., longhand, removed from the elementary curriculum?
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It defies logic and good sense. Presumably, folks can no longer sign their names like they used to. It has been proven that they can’t read names written in cursive.
Is a printed name unique like a written signature, so one’s autograph is distinctively their own?
Somehow, that seems rather doubtful.
But what is cursive’s curse?
Quite frankly, teachers who aren’t. Today they appear to be indoctrinators of stupid, not educators. Moving forward, more cursing will likely be in order regarding the ignorance that caused grade school morons to stop teaching our children … and, unquestionably, cursive isn’t the only problem.
So maybe it’s time for all American patriots to start cursing cursive’s curse. Something needs to be done to save America’s youth.
R.W. Trewyn spent over 55 years inside higher education and he is the author of Vietnam’s War of Hate: Proud Military Veterans Vilified at Home.