20181202.0430

Going back a bit, on 8 August 2017, "Bemoan the Loss of Cursive Writing," by Alfredo Torres, Jr., appeared in the online San Antonio Express-News. In the article, Torres decries the decline in instruction and skill in cursive writing. Five paragraphs lauding calligraphic handwriting lead into a discussion of the circumstances obliging the decline in public school instruction in cursive and the insufficiency of instruction where it still occurs. Torres likens a decline in valuation of cursive to a decline in valuation of formal rules of usage and laments what he sees as a looming disconnection of future readers from past documents.
I have a number of issues with the short opinion piece. I've written about similar comments before, so some of what I might say has already been said; many of the same issues will still apply, so I'll not repeat them. Also, the slippery slope fallacy the article deploys grates. And, for a historian not to remember that 1) language changes (cildas þissum dægum mid geora wane namas declinunge); 2) even those "taught right" have trouble reading the script of earlier periods (I find myself wondering how Torres would handle Carolingian minuscule, for instance, or insular uncial, or even the typeface Caxton uses in printing Malory), so that the issue of people not being able to read the writings of the past is already a concern, not necessarily like to become more of one; and 3) most people, even in the putative "golden age of penmanship," did not write well--when they could write at all--grates. Such things ring of the very kind of sloppy thinking Torres decries as a result of sloppy writing and writing instruction.
This is not to say I do not value cursive writing, as such. Torres describes it as an art, and he is not wrong to do so; he is also not wrong to say that arts should be valued. A well executed pen-hand is a thing of beauty, whatever is written in it. (Yes, even hate speech; how pretty are some of the most poisonous plants and animals in existence, or some of the most destructive storms that have raged across the face of the world? But then, I do occupy positions of privilege...) But none of us who are or purport to be scholars, particularly scholars of the past, should pretend that even in a supposed golden age that a greater percentage of people cared about what we care about than is true now, or that the people of the past, had they access to the same conveniences that we do, would not avail themselves thereof every bit as quickly as we. Nor yet ought we to pass on as sacrosanct the things of the past for no better reason than that they are the things of the past; they may be of value, but they are of value not because they're how things have been done before, but for other reasons--and not all will share those reasons, certainly not enough to bring them above the concerns of the current moment or the demands of making it to the next one to come.