Cursive Writing Skills

Clearly, there is some amount of risk in exposing children to technology that needs to be weighed against the benefits with care. That concern becomes that much greater when technology replaces traditional, elementary school subjects as it has with cursive writing.

Traditionally, children learn to write in block manuscript form first. They use and practice that for a few years and, before the new common core standards, would have started learning to write in cursive around the second grade. In terms of skills, cursive is a new type of decoding. Students must learn a new style of writing and then must learn to decode the new shapes and apply them to the values already learned for block style. Cursive instruction is time consuming and that,

The question arises as to the point at which such skill loss, within a system, becomes permanent. As with cursive writing, little seems to have been written on the subject of skill loss and children; however, the topic as it pertains to businesses and their workers has been considered. While on its face, this appears to be a different topic from this consideration of children and technology, the same question regarding what happens when skills are lost applies. In Forecasting and Impact of the Loss of Critical Human Skills Necessary for Supporting Legacy Systems, Peter A. Sandborn and Varun J. Prabhakar discuss the loss of critical skills needed in the workplace. Specifically, they consider the loss of skills that are needed to maintain legacy information systems, and observe that it takes over twenty years for skill loss to become permanent and unrecoverable (Sandborn and Prabhakar 362). They also concluded that "as the human capital capable of supporting a system shrinks, eventually the time required to support the system will increase" (Sanborn and Prabhakar 362). In other words, whole systems become inefficient as people lose the ability to support it. This concept can be applied to lost handwriting skills and is illustrated by a study by Pam A. Mueller and Daniel M. Oppenheimer that found that longhand note taking was more effective than using a laptop because laptop use results in shallower processing (Mueller and Oppenheimer 1159). Shallower processing, in turn, impairs learning. Impaired learning is inefficient learning. Thus, if students are forced to use keyboards exclusively, then their educations will, over time, be