Florida Bill Would Require Cursive Instruction in Elementary Schools (nbcmiami.com) 245
An anonymous reader shares a report: Elementary-school students would have to learn how to write in cursive, under a bill set to be vetted by a House committee next week. Sen. Erin Grall, R-Vero Beach, filed a similar proposal (SB 444) on Monday. The House Student Academic Success Subcommittee is set to review the measure (HB 127) on Nov. 18.
Sponsored by Rep. Toby Overdorf, R-Palm City, the bill would require cursive instruction in second through fifth grades. The proposal, filed for consideration for the legislative session that begins Jan. 13, also would require students to demonstrate proficiency in cursive by the end of fifth grade.
Sponsored by Rep. Toby Overdorf, R-Palm City, the bill would require cursive instruction in second through fifth grades. The proposal, filed for consideration for the legislative session that begins Jan. 13, also would require students to demonstrate proficiency in cursive by the end of fifth grade.
Great, now make it future-proof. (Score:3, Insightful)
Let them also learn the most often-used 500 Chinese characters while they are at it.
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The janitor at the retirement home doesn't need to know chinese.
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If the future janitor is young enough now to be in second to fifth grade then he or she might.
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What makes you think so?
Everyone from the trumpistan will need to know Chinese in about 10 years down the road if they want some income, be that a job or a pension.
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I think so because chinese retirees will be in china, not in florida.
Re:Great, now make it future-proof. (Score:4, Insightful)
I would rather they spent time learning Civics, and actually understand what the Constitution means, rather than just sticking a miniature copy in their pocket
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Pretty much this...
I had to learn cursive in school, and i've never used it since leaving school.
About the only time i ever write anything by hand is official forms, and for those you are expected to write legibly and often in uppercase.
It's also extremely annoying when someone else writes things by hand and you're expected to read them, it's often extremely difficult to read and leads to errors.
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I can no longer write in cursive. I'm 45 years old. I can read it if it's like an old document such as the constitution, but I can't read any modern cursive without a lot of effort. I find it pointless.
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The only time I ever use cursive is on forms. It's called my signature. I can't imagine closing on a house without being able to at least write my name in cursive. For everything else, I hand print non-cursive. I'm slow with either, so it's of no benefit.
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A "signature" is just an arbitrary mark, and is in itself extremely archaic. Many people simply make some random swipes, doing it differently every time and noone cares.
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Because it's impossible to write your signature legibly, while using your finger instead of a pen or stylus, on a phone sized device.
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It would be better if those people didn't write by hand, and use an electronic method instead.
A useful skill to have. (Score:2)
I think pupils should learn to hand-write. It's a useful skill to have. What I think should be done away with is torturing children with dictations and other non-sense that are basically speed-writing contests _without_ teaching them to type and giving them the option to chose typing over hand-writing.
Re:A useful skill to have. (Score:5, Informative)
Hand-writing is fine. Cursive itself is pointless. Print is just as fast in modern times and is FAR more legible.
If you look at cursive writing from like an 1800's census or something, half of it is virtually impossible to read. Cursive was invented for use with QUILLS. Even if you're writing by hand now you're using a pencil or an ink pen, not a quill.
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Cursive was invented for use with QUILLS.
I thought cursive was invented to write faster, which might still be relevant in some contexts, e.g. handwritten note-taking.
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NO. I think you are confused.
Cursive is one form of hand writing, where letters are joined together in almost a continuous line per word.
Most people who write by hand nowadays do not use cursive.
Which is the point of TFS.
Re: A useful skill to have. (Score:2)
Ive always used the words cursive vs printing to draw the distinction between the two methods of handwriting. I suppose shorthand could be a third. But that is a totally different thing that almost no one knows. (Including me)
Others may identify other words
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Cursive IS hand writing. I think you are confusing it with italic.
Cursive is handwriting, but so is e.g. handwriting in block letters. Handwriting in block letters is usually clearer but slower, whereas handwriting in cursive is usually less clear but can be much faster. Basically, different handwriting styles have different pros and cons and depending on the situation one might be better than the other.
My point is that the cursive handwriting style is still relevant, as the need to handwrite fast at the expense of clarity is still pretty useful in some contexts.
I think American schools should probably teach something. It seems fairly evident that they are not even doing that at present.
Never bee
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Cursive itself is pointless. Print is just as fast in modern times and is FAR more legible.
Print is faster than cursive? Nope.
Modern print is faster than "old" print? How so? Unless you're implying gothic print, I don;t see how there could be any performance increase in hand written print in the last few hundred years.
Cursive is literally less movement, and less removal and application of the instrument tip. It has to be faster, if you know how to write it.
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I don't mean "modern print" as opposed to "old print" - I mean print with modern writing instruments as opposed to the instruments of the time when cursive was invented. They didn't exactly have ball point pens back in the days of yore.
Cursive is not generally less movement in the 2d plane of the paper - it is just less movement up and down in the 3d space so that you are removing the pen from the paper less. The thing is, we can move in 2 directions at once. The tip of a pen can come off the paper as it
Re: A useful skill to have. (Score:2)
I don;t see how there could be any performance increase in hand written print in the last few hundred years.
It's called the ballpoint pen. It's a vastly superior writing instrument to the quills in use before that, and overcomes many of the issues cursive writing was designed to solve (mainly splattering of ink, which happens with any dip pen when you lift off the page). Proficient cursive is still faster than print (in theory, at least) but it's also technically more challenging, so in practice cursive will end up being slower unless you hand write a lot. It's also way easier to read bad print than it is bad cur
And do the teachers know how to? (Score:5, Insightful)
Not as important as bringing back flashcards (Score:5, Insightful)
There was an educational movement just after 2000 where for some reason teachers decided that rote learning was bad, so the activists within the ranks of teachers went through and got rid of everything that was strictly memorization and practice-based. This included everything from phonics to flash cards and of course cursive. In fact I think keyboarding was also a victim. My kids didn't take any of these things in school (we're in Ontario, Canada). Their handwriting is awful.
We sat in the evenings teaching them how to read (sounding words out), doing adding, subtracting, and multiplying flashcards with them, and I bought a typing tutor program and repeatedly encouraged them to use it. The Ontario government brought back mandatory cursive teaching to classrooms just after my kids left elementary school. I would say, of all these things, learning your times tables is way more important than cursive. There was a lot of research in recent years showing that both "learning to understand" *and* rote learning are important for a child's education, but it seems like the school boards won't admit their mistakes until the people who made those mistakes retire.
Just as my kids entered high school, the provincial government, worried that certain minority groups weren't doing well on tests and were over-represented in basic classes (vs. academic level) decided to de-stream both grade 9 and grade 10, and remove all exams from grades 9 and 10 as well. You don't have to write an exam in Ontario until you reach grade 11. Let's be clear... the data showed that kids from minority groups weren't doing as well, and their solution was to stop collecting data. It's absurd.
I really do feel like the education system was unethically experimenting on my kids this whole time. The worst part is that they were basing their decision on pop-psychology teacher-memes instead of hard and fast evidence-based research. The cost of these mistakes will be paid by the generation of kids who are only now moving on to university and the workforce. The whole saga sickens me.
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There was an educational movement just after 2000 where for some reason teachers decided that rote learning was bad, so the activists within the ranks of teachers went through and got rid of everything that was strictly memorization and practice-based. This included everything from phonics to flash cards and of course cursive. In fact I think keyboarding was also a victim. My kids didn't take any of these things in school (we're in Ontario, Canada). Their handwriting is awful.
The best schools always included a mix of techniques in teaching. You had "drill 'till it kills" in math, THEN you had logic and reasoning exercises. You had memorization of names and dates, THEN you had deep discussions of historical events. A good education includes both rote and discussion, and always has.
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They took a nugget of truth and ran with it. Rote learning is bad if it replaces understanding. But I wouldn't survive adulthood if I didn't rote memorize addition and times tables.
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There was an educational movement just after 2000 where for some reason teachers decided that rote learning was bad, so the activists within the ranks of teachers went through and got rid of everything that was strictly memorization and practice-based.
This is pretend history. The anti-phonics things was much earlier (early 20th century, search for Horace Mann) and only hung around because of idiots who refuse to let go of terrible ideas. This is how we got "balanced literacy" in the 1990's, which combined phonetics with Mann's "whole language" nonsense. (If your kids were taught "sight words", this is probably why.) In the 2000's, the emphasis should have been on these five concepts: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension
More than meets the eye (Score:3)
At first blush, this bill looks like just another Republican attempt to appeal to the base while at the same time distracting people from the real reasons why the US education system doesn't stack up well internationally. This is probably true, but there's something far more important at stake. Teaching children cursive writing at a young age develops fine motor skills, and that's something that can pay big benefits down the road.
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In 5th grade my teacher wanted to wring my neck because I was growing quite skillful in drawing and art, yet my cursive writing was worse than a drunk doctor's. I didn't see them as connected, but it was in the teacher's mind. I had a semi-impressionistic art style such that stroke precision mattered less.
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Cursive is shit though and people should stop using it. If we're only keeping it around for signatures we should just learn to accept doing them without. They can learn fine motor skills in an art class.
That would be fine if we were willing to require art classes. Shop classes could also train for fine motor skills as long as the projects included some precision work. I believe the requirements should include *some* form of fine motor skill development.
Depending on your opinion of if the goal of primary school should be to train free thinking or train compliance (I think schools should do a bit of both), training cursive teaches kids to follow instructions and achieve a specific result (well formed cursive
How about typing! (Score:3)
When I was in school in the 1980s, typing was a popular subject with high schoolers, especially those who were going into office work. Then, as computers took over the world, schools ironically started to *drop* typing from their curricula. Why on earth? If anything, younger students should be taught how to type. Knowing how to touch-type saves me probably an hour or more every single day.
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I think that the science shows that kids today are born knowing how to type with their thumbs. So, there's no need to teach them how to type on antiquated keyboards.
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Eventually, they have to grow up and work in an office, where people still use "antiquated" keyoards.
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I learned how to type, in the early 90s, on a typewriter, by watching the Alemdia method tape one single time. And I still remember the jingle.
But I *perfected* my typing on Sierra On-Line games and the like.
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Well, here's my anecdote. I have been typing continuously since the 80s, making a living coding, writing business and management docs, creating software manuals and training materials... my whole adult life had a keyboard in front of it. But I never learned to type "properly". To this day it's a hodge podge process of controlled, high speed chaos.
Several of my aunts were in administration. They all knew how to type properly, and they were slightly faster on the keyboard than I.
They all got repetitive motion
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I never took a typing course, but it was trivial to learn to touch-type once I got a computer and started programming. I don't know anyone who has had a computer for more than a few months who can't touch-type.
Of all the debates to have... (Score:2)
This one at least doesn't require students to take a class that half the parents will find offensive. So as debates over school curricula go, this one seems pretty tame. Whichever way it goes, it's not going to cause harm.
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It's making kids waste time learning a useless skill when they could be learning stuff needed in modern society.
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Definitely an important question to answer!
Forwards (lean where you're writing to) (Score:2)
Writing is kinda useful (Score:5, Interesting)
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Yup, I got really good at writing text due to my drafting/architecture/engineering courses through high school and college. Of course, that was before schools had really gone CAD, I was right on the edge of that. Started by hand, ended in AutoCAD. I can still break out the fine print when needed, but my quick note handwriting is chicken scratch that only I can read.
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research shows again and again that you retain information differently when you hand write vs type.
As someone who has illegible handwriting, it's what saved me in college. I could remember what I wrote but I couldn't go back and study from it.
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As someone who has illegible handwriting, it's what saved me in college.
I hope you never turned in a handwritten essay.
I used to grade such things. Any paper with bad handwriting was an absolute horror. It did not save the author from a poor grade.
I could remember what I wrote but I couldn't go back and study from it.
At the very least, you should be able to read your own handwriting. If not, you are a Lost Boy.
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Yes, I had a couple of drafting courses when I studied Engineering and the prof was an absolute stickler for perfectly-formed letters. I resented it at the time, but now find it very useful to be able to write legibly.
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research shows again and again that you retain information differently when you hand write vs type
True, but keep in mind that this is not universal. For me, and for two of my children, writing by hand reduces learning and retention. We have some sort of dyslexia-adjacent disability that prevents us from "automating" writing the way most people do. When kids learn to write, they learn to draw the letter shapes out line by line and curve by curve, but for most people the shape-drawing quickly becomes automatic. Not so for me, or my kids. Writing takes focus and attention, not on the text being writte
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Sure, but that's print. As other have pointed out, most of the advantages of cursive have gone away since the introduction of the ballpoint pen. Some of the simplified letterforms (e.g. the lowercase 'a') are useful, but looping and joining aren't. Cursive is long obsolete as a writing form. At best it's more aesthetically
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And no matter how fast you can type, research shows again and again that you retain information differently when you hand write vs type
Yeah, I noticed this when I went back to school at age 60. Everyone else in the class was using their laptops. I had brought mine, but it wasn't worth it. I needed to have the info go through my brain to my arm and hand to help me retain the info.
Borugh to you by a state which (Score:2)
still practices school corporal punishment.
Figures.
Russians only learn cursive (Score:2)
They don't spend much time teaching how to write in print form and go straight to cursive. Mostly because Cyrillic is slow to write out compared to the simplified Latin script like the single stroke forms we teach children to use in the West.
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Have you seen Russian [wikipedia.org] cursive [wikipedia.org]? If what you're saying is true, it would completely explain the fall of the Soviet Union, the collapse of the Russian economy in 1998, Rocky IV, etc. without the need to consider any other external factors.
Teach penmanship and Spencerian (Score:2)
While they're at it... (Score:2)
teach them to write using fountain pens, apply sealing wax to the envelopes they'll use to send checks they've written to the phone company, and how to dial rotary phones. Oh, and to read ticker tapes coming off stock machines showing the current prices of PanAm airlines, Westinghouse manufacturing, and Sear-Roebuck department store.
Basic skills can teach competence. (Score:2)
Everyone gets out of joint about specifics of the different practice-based skills we no longer teach. Something also lost is that practice skills can be mastered using ... practice. We have replaced it with a lot of more wooly teaching which I think is intended to teach the ability to properly consider the problem and search for the core concepts. The issue with this is that we have very little evidence that humans can actually learn that level of discrimination en masse, and we also don't really underst
I learned ... (Score:2)
*I probably should have gone to medical school. [blogspot.com]
It's not that hard (Score:2)
California did that already (Score:2)
Two years ago.
Other subjects (Score:2)
Clinging to the past⦠(Score:2)
Why, though? (Score:4, Informative)
I'm old enough (almost 60) to have learned cursive in school, and it really wasn't a big deal and I certainly never suffered from it. But other than my signature, I don't think I've written anything in cursive in 3 decades or so. Almost everything I write is typed on a computer, and the small amount of handwriting I do is done using non-cursive printing because it usually involves filling in a form.
If you are studying history or classics or whatever and need to read old manuscripts, then sure... you need cursive. But almost nobody else does nowadays.
The only exception I can think of is if you want to hand-write notes in class, which I found made them stick in my memory much better than typing them. In that case, you need cursive to be able to write at a decent speed.
I grew up in the 50s and 60s (Score:2)
I was forced to learn cursive
I hated it and sucked at it
As soon as I was able, I stopped using it
The only value in learning cursive is for calligraphy or reading historical documents
It's a dinosaur that deserves to go extinct
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Re: It a guidebook... (Score:5, Informative)
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FWIW, my most useful "STEM" notes are in hand-written cursive.
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World's fastest typist (Score:4, Informative)
Re:World's fastest typist (Score:5, Funny)
It's a typo. He probably meant 40 ... or 24 ... either way, he sucks at typing and should just learn cursive.
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Unless you are using a stenographers keyboard, I'm calling 100% BS on this comment. 240 wpm would put you in world record territory.
This is the internet. *Everything* is 100% BS.
Including what I'm saying right now.
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This is the internet. *Everything* is 100% BS.
Including what I'm saying right now.
I'm inclined to agree. I think it's more like 90%. [wikipedia.org]
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I can type 240wpm.
That smells like bullshit to me. In what language? This article [pcmag.com] puts the world record at 300-ish. "To put this in perspective, remember that 40 WPM is the average typing speed for most people. At 300 WPM, Rocket is well over seven times as fast. Faster, even, than most courtroom stenographers, who use specialized keyboards and phonetic shorthand to achieve speeds of around 225 WPM."
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Wow, you clearly have some personal problem with cursive. Did someone make fun of you for having bad handwriting?
Get over it. It's not teaching people how to write with a quill pen here. Cursive writing is still everywhere. It's still a useful skill.
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I used to use legal pads for contemporaneous notes taken during projects, but found them to be relatively worthless because they are not searchable
Learning to touch type, in a manner that allows for recording of statements in a searchable format is VASTLY superior
Focus on the future, not the past
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Re: It a guidebook... (Score:5, Informative)
Re: It a guidebook... (Score:4, Insightful)
Note-taking for memory/learning is much better handwritten. In fact, I never studied in college but on tests I could remember the layout and some of the contents of my handwritten notes without even seeing them a second time. That muscle movement is a second path to memory formation. So jotting something down you need later can actually help you not to need the written note later.
Today, I still keep track of my to-do lists on handwritten paper so that I can remember them.
For actual communication, I even hate texting because I want a full-size keyboard for typing. I am very slow at handwriting.
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Note-taking for memory/learning is much better handwritten.
This matches my experience as well. I took so many notes in college I had basically a bankers box full of notebooks when I graduated. Rarely ever read them after I wrote them. Just the act of pen to paper was sufficient to adequately store most of it upstairs. And most of it done in cursive. I have passable penmanship when I take the time to do it, but if I'm writing quickly my print (or whatever the antonym of cursive is) is unreadable, at least my cursive is half-ass legible. Typing? Mostly forgotten b
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While I agree that the act of writing does improve memory, this is far outweighed by the inability to quickly search handwritten notes
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Which girls rarely play, at least not the types of games that actually improve motor control, and plenty of boys don't either.
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How about Art class? Do they still teach that, or was it dropped to meet some testing requirement?
I taught myself calligraphy, and never use cursive unless it is for that purpose
Re: It a guidebook... (Score:2)
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I don't really see what cursive would provide that printing would not. They aren't that different from a fine skills perspective.
Sure, cursive is prettier. But the best argument for cursive is speed. It's just faster. And if you have to write a lot of text, the difference becomes significant. But nobody has to write in high volumes any more.
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I currently see that hardly anyone under 60 even knows how to hold a pen or pencil properly for fine motor control. That should be taught regardless of cursive. Unfortunately, at this point, there probably aren't any elementary school teachers who know how to hold a pen or pencil themselves.
Re:It a guidebook... (Score:5, Insightful)
How to watch republicans piss away taxpayer money on utterly useless crap, trying to get back to a past that time forgot...
Oh FFS. There are lots of knowledge that isn't "practical" yet is valuable to our culture. You people piss and moan about children not being properly educated, but when someone suggests that things like cursive writing and other finer points of civilization should continue to be taught, you scoff with bullshit like this.
My mother's generation had mandatory classes in Latin during high school in the early 1960's. As a culture, we're the poorer for having dropped those kinds of requirements. There's a reason the finer schools still require them. I'm all for more of a focus on the practical for kids... more shop classes, more practical math (loans and interest, basic accounting, etc), but to suggest that we should chuck all of the finer points of culture into the trash because it's "trying to get back to a past that time forgot" is complete and utter horseshit.
Re: It a guidebook... (Score:3)
As a culture, we're the poorer for having dropped those kinds of requirements.
I thought we had too many kids taking underwater basket weaving and wanted more of them in the trades where foreign language requirements only makes the cost of education unnecessarily more expensive. Or that was last week. But ... still, foreign language requirements are all over the place in high school and university programs. Or did you mean Latin specifically and not Spanish for some reason.
I can't keep up with right wing "culture" bullshit. It seems so arbitrary, like are we going to do Germanic runes
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like are we going to do Germanic runes next,
probably [adl.org]
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Sure. Everyone should learn Latin in school. Greek first though. You don't properly apprciate Latin if you don't already have Greek. Then a few modern languages, at least one Romance to follow the Latin plus a Germanic and some form of Chinese. Better throw in Japanese and something with click consonants too. Practical math absolutely, and shop and don't forget home ec. Advanced math too... none of this "choosing" to take calculus. Science classes should cover physics, biology and chemistry for everyone, to
Re:It a guidebook... (Score:4, Insightful)
Ok. YOU pay for it then. Most people don't want to pay millions of tax dollars on a skill that hasn't been in wide use for nearly 50 years. Better things to spend money on.
You've posted this response all over the thread.
Thing is, anyone can apply it to every part of the curriculum.
So to demonstrate your sincerity in the discussion, list for us the specific skills you do want your tax dollars to teach in schools.
Re:It a guidebook... (Score:5, Insightful)
That's not what makes education expensive. And learning languages that influence later languages (Latin) is the type of metalearning that prepares you for higher education. And helps if you're in a STEM field too, since so much language is borrowed from there.
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The same people pushing cursive are also pushing privatization and the elimination of higher education for everyone except a handful of the elite.
Bullshit. I wonder where you get this stuff?
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Such as whining books by black authors contained hate messages or would indoctrinate kids [go.com], or removing books [cbsnews.com] by Stephen King, Kurt Vonnegut, or Ernest Hemingway.
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