Ontario

Anyone know what research the minister is referencing? The academic later quoted said there wasn't much research. I also wonder what was the basis for dropping cursive... The article appears to be just a bunch of cheering with little substance or context.

Personally I just dislike cursive and always have. Other people's cursive writing is a pain in the he ass to read much of the time. The speed benefit is crushed by legibility issues. Doing a lot of genealogy research for example really underscores this, when most documents were hand written in cursive. .Yeah, great I can read cursive, but it is so often tedious and painful to decipher. There is a reason many forms came to say "print clearly". Just my opinion and experience.

Not a super big deal either way, but so far I'm glad my kids didn't have to bother with cursive. Artist, musician and computer programmer. Bilingual. Cursive-free!

It’s funny. I’ve had discussions with a lot of bitter people who complain about having been forced to learn cursive. I luckily really enjoyed calligraphy and cursive. It remains important in my field of work (STEM) to a certain extent.

At the end of the day, I view cursive as a positive for many reasons: it is artistic, it teaches fine motor control, and despite changes in the way we work, handwriting remains important and useful in many areas of work.

I see it the same way I see the importance of sketching and visualising. I expect most learned people to be able to take a pen and sketch or illustrate when needed. Cursive is just a vehicle for similar skills.

Of course it needs to be balanced with the teaching of other subjects, but I do not think that school is lacking of time to teach subjects. There is plenty of time during childhood to learn skills. This is one such skill.

we learned when i was a kid and NEVER used it at all. I was so stressed out trying to learn it. I already had difficulty printing then they wanted me to learn cursive so i did and then never used it even once.

When I went to school we started the year already behind schedule in math, and science. Maybe we could be spending our childrens time a little more wisely.

Teach keyboarding instead, will be a lot more useful.

I'm sort of confused by this: the point of cursive was to make it more efficient to write quickly, without lifting pen from paper and causing blotting.

In a very "medium is the message" way, it's tied to the pen. In an era of pencils and pens that don't blot (and this little thing called a "keyboard") it really is kind of an anachronism.

Oh, great. This will come in clutch when you get sent back in time and have to write Aunt Tilly from the front line of the Boer War.

The shocking piece of this news story for me was that it was ever made optional in the first place! Crazy to think a large portion of some ~17 years of students don't know how to read or write it!

Seems like a fair thing to teach considering students will be writing exams by hand most of their lives. Sucks that they just threw curriculum changes so last minute at the teachers without much support.

That seems very silly..