“I can’t read that,” I heard a young man say, “I don’t know cursive.” He was a middle school student and, like me, participating in a group exercise at a public meeting about the future of our local school.
I wasn’t about to admit that I had written the words he couldn’t read, but his tone, somewhere between wondrous and confessional, was so inviting that a woman next to him in line read the words aloud. More than a dozen people had written phrases or sentences on this poster, but until this moment I hadn’t realized that only mine was written in script.
At 74, I’m accustomed to reminders that the world is turning faster than I can keep up. Video images move too quickly for my taste, and dialog as well, which is a strange development for someone who loves the wit and pace of Restoration comedy. Sometimes I blame the lag on hearing loss, but the truth is that I like to dwell on thoughts and images a little longer than young people in our brave new world.
But I began this piece talking about cursive, and I’d like to stick with the theme a little longer.
In this keyboard age, it makes little sense for teachers to squander classroom time teaching cursive the way I learned it in the death throes of the “Palmer Method” — hour after hour with my teacher at the blackboard writing perfect letters between carefully measured lines while I copied them on paper at my desk. Added together, those hours would have been better spent learning Mandarin or Arabic.
Is it mere sentimentality to ask if there might be some loss for young people who can neither read nor write cursive? When they are grown, for instance, how will they write condolence notes when someone dies? I’m no Luddite; every day I write emails that look a lot like letters, but when I lose a family member or a dear friend, I turn to pen and ink.
And what about the young scholars who one day will need to do primary research in the antiquities collections of their university libraries — without knowing cursive, will they be able to pore over handwritten letters, notes and journals?
Perhaps only a few of today’s middle schoolers will have that problem, but then there is the matter of love letters. I remember a time when the loops and rises of a writer’s hand moved my heart as much as the words themselves. Will tomorrow’s lovers reread their texts or emails with the same hopeful curiosity?
Of course, these ruminations are mere afterthoughts, the wanderings of a mind grown old. Back when I overheard the boy’s remark at the public meeting, I was thinking of generations of my own students. They all knew cursive, but they groaned in frustration whenever they tried to read the comments I wrote in the margins of their carefully typed papers. It was an amusing irony that ran through my entire teaching career, having to translate handwritten suggestions on how they could improve the clarity of their prose.
If I’m honest, I already know the answer to my rhetorical questions. Young people who cannot read or write cursive will eventually learn it if and when they need it, and they will learn more efficiently than I did in all those sleepy afternoons in grade school. How I know this is from watching the education of my own children; almost everything of value they know today they learned not in school but on their own as adults. What they learned in school was how to learn.
Apart from occasional senior moments, I shouldn’t worry about feeling out of sync with the world. Dislocation is the normal state for visionaries and geniuses — the Stephen Hawkings of the world, the Sapphos and the Picassos, and for the people who will discover vaccines for pandemics and who make the art that liberates the rest of us from the prisons of our own imaginations.
Fictional heroes in literature are out of sync with the world; these unlucky people sweep us up in conflicts we are too complacent or too overwhelmed to take up ourselves. Heroes like Antigone — who in an act of decency that costs her life, defies martial law in ancient Thebes — act as our moral surrogates.
Of course, in my case, being out of sync with the world has nothing to do with genius or heroics. It’s predictable and comic.
As for sentimentality, I must admit that there are times when the old ways serve me poorly. Recently, I stopped dead in an aisle of a local supermarket, staring at my shopping list and trying to read a word my wife — a woman who once wrote love letters to me — had scribbled.
“Antidotes?” I texted to her from my phone.
“Artichokes!” she replied.
How did shoppers accomplish anything before the invention of smartphones?
It just might be that a better world is coming. A few weeks ago, I was doing some arithmetic with my grandson, sums too basic for a calculator, but still requiring thought. Using tables I had memorized as a child, I came up with answers more quickly than he did; but he had a method. As I listened to the logic of his approach, I could see that he understood the structure of numbers in a way I never did when I was in grade school.
That day was my grandson’s 10th birthday, and I gave him a card and a fishing rod. He opened the card politely and reacted with a smile, but his attention was on the rod, unwrapped except for a small red bow.
Now I realize that he may have had trouble reading what I had written on his card, silly words he could have guessed without reading them. His mind was busy looking ahead and imagining the fish he would catch from the bow of my canoe.
Jonathan Stableford lives in Strafford.