Cursive Handwriting

One of the girls at Hallmark this week told me that handwriting is being removed from many a 3rd grade curriculum.  She is studying to be a teacher and it's a topic of interest in one of her classes.  The unit on cursive handwriting is being removed to make room for all of the standardized testing that has to take place these days and ,with computers, the internet, and texting, there isn't a lot of reason to teach handwriting anymore. 

This made me incredibly sad to hear as handwriting is one of the more important personal things.  First I wonder how students will be able to read letters that their grandparents left behind if they can't read handwriting.  One of the most cherished things I have are handwritten recipes that belonged to my grandmother.  I also have a quick grocery list I found in her things.  She didn't intend for it to be anything other than a reminder but it's something she wrote so it had value to me.  If it had been a typed list, it wouldn't have mattered.  If it had been a temporary list on an iphone I would never have seen it.  And I am not saying these technological advances are bad things. Certainly it is better for the environment and the clutter in our homes to streamline these everyday processes.  But doesn't it make our lives a little more temporary with less evidence of our existence. 

Will cursive handwriting have to be a special class in grad school for historians and English professors, like Latin and Middle English?  Source documents from less than 30 years ago will be inaccessible to future generations without them.  There will always be a need to hand write something, but the art of cursive writing is going to disappear.  Even now most people print when they write.  I personally find cursive is faster and takes up less space, but maybe it's because I had the unit in third grade and I didn't own a computer until college.  For my cousins, printing may be faster than cursive because they are unskilled in that technique. 

And what happens if we are faced with a Jericho type situation where all technology is rendered useless and we have to go back to manual labor to survive?  (I've finished the series by the way and was sorry to see it end)  Will people know how to hand write?

I read this article today about how handwriting style is changed and influenced.  It was interesting and made me think of the analyzing handwriting book I had in grade school.  The idea being that you could tell a person's emotional state by looking at their handwriting.  It was even a major plot point in a dime store novel I read by Gypsy Rose Lee. All along people thought this woman had committed suicide because they found a note.  But Gypsy was able to determine that the woman was really murdered by someone by the slant of the writing.