NY Times: “What Killed Penmanship?”

Isabella Paoletto, writing about the disappearing skill of writing and reading cursive:

In 2010, cursive was dropped from Common Core standards, and children in kindergarten through 12th grade at public schools were no longer required to learn it in school. The change was controversial, and many legislators have since fought for its resurgence in schools.

I stopped writing in cursive until about four years ago, when I switched from taking notes on the iPad back to paper notebooks. This past Christmas Jordan also gave me a fountain pen to try out and I find that I prefer cursive when writing with it.

My kids didn’t have to learn cursive in school (although my youngest has taught herself) and they find it hard to read my handwriting, even when it is quite neat. I suppose that’s going to be a generational divide, but I’m interested to see what tools emerge to allow people to decipher older written documents—will it be some sort of augmented reality overlay, like we already have for translating other languages on the fly?