When was the last time you used cursive? This is the main argument that is being used as a reason to take cursive out of our public school curriculum. When I first discovered that cursive was no longer being taught in many schools, I was shocked. According to some of my former teachers, school districts across the country are no longer teaching cursive. Apparently, there are several reasons cursive is no longer being taught, and the main reason is that cursive is "too hard" to teach, and to expect students to learn. This reason is the hardest for me to stomach as a person who learned, and was taught cursive. I was taught by two very capable 2nd and 3rd-grade teachers, but apparently, cursive is going to be too hard for this generation of teachers to teach. And, as a 7-year-old child, I was able to grasp the concept of cursive handwriting, and to be told the reason that the next generation of school children won't be learning cursive because it's "too hard", frustrates me. This just sends yet another strong message about one of the biggest issues our country faces; laziness. It's not that it's too hard to teach cursive, it's that the next generation doesn't want to put in the extra effort to teach it, and kids don't want to put in the effort to learn it. This is exactly what happened with shorthand. How many of you reading this can still read or write shorthand? Probably very few, because shorthand was done away with years ago.

The bigger issue here is that all of our historical, handwritten documents, are written in cursive. Diaries from relatives, letters, photo captions, scrapbooks and things that are passed down from generation to generation are written in cursive. The future generations are not going to be able to read these, and cursive is going to be treated as a foreign language, and that is a sad, sad thought. Imagine, that because the next generation can't read cursive we are going to have to place a "translated" copy of the Constitution next to the original because people won't be able to read it.

People will argue, " Well, cursive is never used anymore, and we don't need shorthand because we have computers". I asked thirty of my friends if they still used cursive, and how often they used it. When I got all my answers, 27 of my 30 friends use cursive every day as a regular part of their lives. That's 90 percent of them. I know that I use cursive every day; in my journaling, letter writing, thank you notes, and my regular everyday writing. I actually still use shorthand as well, when I take notes during an interview, or notes during class because pen and paper are still more convenient to carry around than a laptop.

So, it appears that unless we as a generation choose to teach our children cursive, they won't be learning. So how do you feel? Do you think we should still be teaching cursive? Or should we just let it become a language of the past, like shorthand, form writing, and dictation?