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Does this feel like the end of Civilization? Imagine these kids getting stuck on a desert island..and they can't spell "help"? Or in a European country or visiting the Smithsonian museum. ...and they can't read a letters on display in museum... its happening...
The argument is that cursive is time-consuming and not as useful as the keyboard skills students will need as they move on to junior high and high school, he says.
So what's the big deal if your little John Hancock doesn't have a big loopy cursive signature of his own?
Antiquated or no, cursive is viewed by some parents and educators as essential to an education -- especially as text-happy teens become ever more thumb-centric.
Increasingly the argument that students should be spending more time learning keyboard skills than cursive -- because that's the future! -- is beginning to look like a straw man.
"Of course it's important to know how to typewrite," says associate professor Anne Mangen at the University of Stavanger's Reading Centre. "But handwriting seems, based on empirical evidence from neuroscience, to play a larger role in the visual recognition and learning of letters.
"This is something one should be aware of in an educational context," she stresses.
In other words, those who learn to write by hand learn better.
Mangen points to an experiment involving two groups of adults in which participants were taught a new, foreign alphabet. One group learned the characters by hand, the other learned only to recognize them on a screen and with a keyboard.
Weeks after the experiment, the group that learned the letters by hand consistently scored better on recognition tests than those who learned with a keyboard. Brain scans of the hands-on group also showed greater activity in the part of the brain that controls language comprehension, motor-related processes and speech-associated gestures.
READ THE WHOLE STORY HERE
AND READ THE TIME MAGAZINE STOR HERE
