This got me thinking a bit about how amazingly technological advances are changing our society in such drastic ways.
Teh MZNBC Newz wrote:Cursive writing is fading skill, but so what?
Fewer schools emphasize ‘penmanship’ as computer use increases
CHARLESTON, W.Va. - Charleston resident Kelli Davis was in for a surprise when her daughter brought home some routine paperwork at the start of school this fall. Davis signed the form and then handed it to her daughter for the eighth-grader's signature.
"I just assumed she knew how to do it, but I have a piece of paper with her signature on it and it looks like a little kid's signature," Davis said.
Her daughter was apologetic, but explained that she hadn't been required to make the graceful loops and joined letters of cursive writing in years. That prompted a call to the school and another surprise.
West Virginia's largest school system teaches cursive, but only in the 3rd grade.
"It doesn't get quite the emphasis it did years ago, primarily because of all the technology skills we now teach," said Jane Roberts, assistant superintendent for elementary education in Kanawha County schools.
Davis' experience gets repeated every time parents, who recall their own hours of laborious cursive practice, learn that what used to be called "penmanship" is being shunted aside at schools across the country in favor of 21st century skills.
Fewer people using handwriting
The decline of cursive is happening as students are doing more and more work on computers, including writing. In 2011, the writing test of the National Assessment of Educational Progress will require 8th and 11th graders to compose on computers, with 4th graders following in 2019.
"We need to make sure they'll be ready for what's going to happen in 2020 or 2030," said Katie Van Sluys, a professor at DePaul University and the president of the Whole Language Umbrella, a conference of the National Council of Teachers of English.
Handwriting is increasingly something people do only when they need to make a note to themselves rather than communicate with others, she said. Students accustomed to using computers to write at home have a hard time seeing the relevance of hours of practicing cursive handwriting.
"They're writing, they're composing with these tools at home, and to have school look so different from that set of experiences is not the best idea," she said.
Text messaging, e-mail, and word processing have replaced handwriting outside the classroom, said Cheryl Jeffers, a professor at Marshall University's College of Education and Human Services, and she worries they'll replace it entirely before long.
"I am not sure students have a sense of any reason why they should vest their time and effort in writing a message out manually when it can be sent electronically in seconds."
Cursive writing is ‘a gift’
For Jeffers, cursive writing is a lifelong skill, one she fears could become lost to the culture, making many historic records hard to decipher and robbing people of "a gift."
That fear is not new, said Kathleen Wright, national product manager for handwriting at Zaner-Bloser, a Columbus, Ohio-based company that produces a variety of instructional material for schools.
"If you go back, you can see the same conversations came up with the advent of the typewriter,"she said.
Every year, Zaner-Bloser sponsors a national handwriting competition for schools, and this year saw more than 200,000 entries, a record.
"Everybody talks about how sometime in the future every kid's going to have a keyboard, but that isn't really true."
Few schools make keyboards available for day-to-day writing. The majority of school work, from taking notes to essay tests, is still done by hand.
At Mountaineer Montessori in Charleston, teacher Sharon Spencer stresses cursive to her first- through third-graders. By the time her students are in the third grade, they are writing book reports and their spelling words in cursive.
To Spencer, cursive writing is an art that helps teach them muscle control and hand-eye coordination.
"In the age of computers, I just tell the children, what if we are on an island and don't have electricity? One of the ways we communicate is through writing," she said.
There is an entire second page to this article, I didn't want to post too much, so I omitted it, although I'll include an excerpt composed of the final two paragraphs:
"People still have to write, even if it's just scribbling," said Paula Sassi, a certified master graphologist and a member of the American Handwriting Analysis Foundation.
"Just like when we went from quill pen to fountain pen to ball point, now we're going from the art of handwriting to handwriting purely as communication," she said.
Pondering how exceedingly influential technological advances have been, are becoming, and will be in our society is just fascinating, but also frightening at the same time.
I tend to wonder if we're becoming too reliant on the machines and gadgets we take for granted each day. Our phones, our cars, our automated electronics, TVs, and especially the slavemasters, as I call them:
Our computers.
Don't get me wrong, not everyone is enslaved to their computer, not everyone even has access to a computer to begin with. As for me, the tale is different, I'm one who is absolutely enslaved and dependent upon advanced machinery. If it were to blank out on me, which it has before, I'd go absolutely insane.
It makes me wonder what would happen if, in maybe two or three or maybe four decades, something happened that caused a society mostly dependent upon machines to loose most access to advantages given by said machines. With such little emphasis on hands on agricultural skills, handwritting capabilities, other means of communication besides phones, email, and so forth--where would that generation lie?
It's hard to think of stepping back, even a bit, I think it'll be 2050 when we create a supercomputer with intelligence that exceeds the entire human race, it's hard to think of backtracking when our dependence on technology is so vast we barely recognize it in our daily lives.
I can't remember the exact excerpt--and I'd love it if someone could remind me if possible--from Isaac Asimov's book, i, Robot. It was the part where QT was questioning his existence being brought about by humans, the premise he brought up just threw my mind into speculation: it was something along the lines of, "How could inferior humans create superior robots?"
Ever since I read that book, it always gave me a new perspective on such thinking, why humans would create things superior to them--things that if given any form of mind capable of reasoning, could easily destroy them in a matter of days.
So where does it end? Where does technology, machinery, all of these advances come to a stop? Where do they meet their limits?
Are we becoming so bent on running our lives with advanced machinery as the foundation that we'd be powerless without it? Is this nothing new, just on a newer scale? If we were without the technological advances we take for granted today tomorrow, or in the future, would we be able to survive?
Are we too inferior to technology? Even if we are, is it significant? Are we foolish enough to ever create machinery with thoughts that can outwit, perform, and outdo us in every way, shape, and form? If we were, what purposes would such an invention serve?
Am I questioning things that don't need to be? Am I taking things out of porportion?
Or are we creating our own doomsday through such advances in technology and machinery?
Disclaimer: Any spelling/grammar errors, feel free to overlook or correct me on, I still haven't gotten SpellCheck fully running, and I have to open a new window to use an alternative SC until I get it working. Sorry too for being sort of vague as well, it's almost midnight and I'm not thinking fully.
