Quote:
Originally Posted by Phogg
Cursive script (I am willing to debate with all comers) is as necessary as a slide rule. It takes too long to learn, considering it will never be needed in the business world these young ones are going to grow up to.
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Let me tell you a tale. In college I became interested in a game called shogi. After college I worked in London for a while and found the London Shogi Association. led by an enthusiast who had both ime and money to spend. He ent to Japan and attemped to research the history of the game. His greatest problem was the large number of documents that no one could read anymore.
This was because of two things. One was that, roughly 100 years ago, the government decided to simplify the language by reducing he number of ideograms in use. The second was the ongoing process of simplifying cursive writing. The result is historic documents that consist of squiggles that no one can read.
My fear is that removing cursive writing from the curriculam will have a similar effect over a similar span of time. You could argue that there is plenty of time to convert all documents of interest, but I beg leave to doubt that the job would be done, especially for private documents (like great gran's recipe book or the notes in the family bible) and that is just in North America with its short written history.