Today's fuddy-duddy, "Dang it, why do they keep replacing the stuff I like with all this newfangled nonsense?" moment:
Walk into any school these days and the kids aren't working on their loops. They're in keyboarding class.
Cursive writing and handwritten letters are the past. Keyboarding, emails and texts are the now -- and the future. Indiana's school curriculum now reflects that.
This month, Indiana joined a growing list of states that no longer require schools to teach cursive writing. Instead, Indiana will mandate schools to teach keyboarding in elementary school.
"I think it's progressive of our state to be ahead on this," said Denna Renbarger, assistant superintendent for Lawrence Township schools. "There are a lot more important things than cursive writing."
The national move away from cursive is being fueled by the Common Core curriculum. That is an effort led by governors in 46 states, including Indiana, to agree to common standards and, eventually, common tests to measure whether kids are learning them. Cursive is not part of the Common Core curriculum. Keyboarding is.
Change isn't always progress, Ms. Renbarger.
What's not made clear by the stories I've seen is how much the schools will teach any writing -- block printining included -- in their shift in emphasis to keyboarding, so I guess how I feel will depend on learning that. But in general, I understand the importance of keyboarding (or "typing," as it was called when I took the class), and how keeping a large time for handwriting would eat into other important subjects, and I even get it that a large part of my attachment to cursive is romantic and not entirely sutainable by conclusive evidence. But I can't help thinking that something important is being lost in the learning process and the way students put together not just words and sentences but thoughts.
This is a completely conservative, outlook, by the way, at least if you consider yourself a Burkean at heart (as I do). Conservatism should not insist on keeping all things the same or resisting all change, but rather look to ways of keeping the best we have as a foundation to build on rather than constantly tearing everything down and starting over.
