Shoe-lace tying, cursive and other dying arts

You know how some kids want to run before they can even crawl? Lately, my 6-year-old daughter has been pushing the limits this way. She's in kindergarten, knows and prints all of her letters well. So she says she wants to learn cursive. Are you kidding me? The desire to learn is to be applauded. The idea of her learning cursive now is laughable. I mentioned this to a friend, who happens to be a teacher. She told me:

"No, she definitely doesn't need to learn cursive. Cursive is a dying art. She'll eventually need to have a signature, and to be able to read cursive. But other than that, it's not really necessary any more."

Well, I was just looking for a laugh, but her response kind of took me aback. It is rare when I actually write anything out long-hand. The death knell has been tolling for the art of letter-writing for quite some time. So perhaps she has a point. The majority of print communication is via email, texting, chat (all typing arts). My husband notes that some people exhibit such panache with a Blackberry that they earn the nickname: fingers of fury. Riverdance for digits.

Call me sentimental, but I hope cursive doesn't really go away. Nor shoe-lace tying. My daughter's recently been tasked to learn how to tie shoe-laces in her kindergarten. Believe it or not, she didn't own any shoes that actually lace up. But we found some at a consignment store and started practicing. She can sometimes tie the laces properly, but we have much practice in our future to truly master this potentially dying art. Again, perhaps velcro has taken over the world, and it's too late to turn back the hands of time. Maybe shoe-laces will go the way of the do-do bird. But for now I'm happy to try to teach her (make a bow or tree with one lace, then the little bunny hops around the tree, and finds a little hole...) I have a strong memory of my parents teaching me to tie my laces. It was on a family vacation with neighbors in Michigan. The neighbor kids and my brother told me the attic in the house we rented was filled with vampire bats who would come and suck my blood while I was sleeping. I slept little, had many nightmares, did eventually learn to tie my laces, but often linked to an irrational fear of vampire bats... In any case, I'm heartened to see that wikipedia has a listing about tying shoe-laces, so maybe it's not a dying art after all...

What do you think? Are cursive and lacing things of the past? Or do they have a future in our technology-obsessed world? 

Comments

[Dianne]

Half way through my 12 year teaching career I began teaching cursive italics. It makes so much more sense and is so much quicker to learn than the traditional Palmer method pictured in the news article link. The kids with italic printing, then they went to cursive italics and finally by changing to a slanted nib pen they wrote in beautiful calligraphy. Now THAT is a dying art and it wasn't THAT long ago but I hope for a renewed interest along with origami. I enjoyed teaching italics and would be happy to show you and DD. It has its place just like other crafts.

[Heather]

It is rare to find kid shoes with shoelaces, but any athletic shoe I've ever purchased has them. I can't imagine the shoelace going away anytime soon (but I also was pretty sure that the cell phone thing would never catch on either, so what do I know).

Proper cursive is another thing. My handwriting has morphed into a hybrid of print and cursive over the years, but I do hand write quite a bit. But I am old. With all the texting that goes on I wouldn't be surprised if people sprout additional thumbs in a few generations. I hope they still teach it in school, but I would leave it to the teachers. I was taught cursive in 2nd grade.

[Betty]

Just because letter-writing has slowly become a dying art, I did recently decide to sit down and handwrite a real letter with paper and ink to a friend who lives in Florida because I thought she would enjoy the novelty of receiving such a letter. It came out to a total of 3 pages on 8 1/2" x 11" stationery paper, and, boy, it was hard work! It took me something like 5 days to cobble this letter together because my fingers weren't accustomed to writing so much in one sitting! My sloppy writing was definitely a hybrid mixture of cursive and print.

I don't know if cursive is a dying art or not. My DD who is in 4th grade told me that they still regularly practice it in their classroom, and it usually comes out to about 2 pages per week.

[Nat]

I'd hate to see handwriting go away altogether. I remember when learning cursive was a big deal because that's how grown ups write. Anyway, there are still plenty of opportunities to use cursive or cursive italics (I don't really know what the difference is since the later was taught a few years after my time.) There are thank you notes, postcards, and note taking. Also, technology is not infallible. Once in a while, somebody's going to have to grab a piece of paper and jot something down quickly. An example: not exactly the same thing, but we once got turned away from a small sushi restaurant because they decided they couldn't open because their computer was down. How hard is it to keep written records of the order, add stuff up manually and ask for cash? IMHO, the more tools we give kids to work with, the better off they'll be.

[Kate Gladstone]

Keep in mind the handwriting research which has found that the fastest legible writers don't use either "pure" cursive or "pure" printing — they tend to use print-like letter-shapes and connect some, not all, letters (making only the easiest joins and skipping the harder ones). The results tend to look as if these writers had come up on their own with the cursive italic style.

You can find more about this on my handwriting improvement/re-modeling web-site at http://www.learn.to/handwrite or http://www.global2000.net/handwritingrepair

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