Gen Z Can’t Read or Write Cursive
According to Pew Research, Gen Z consists of everyone born between 1997 and 2012. How “they” arrived at that time period is a mystery, and frankly, I don’t much care how or why they picked that date range to define a generation of snowflakes.
After learning this, I hate them even more: Generation Z never learned to write in cursive.
That’s a tragedy, since there is no more achingly beautiful form of the English language than a love letter written in what we used to call “longhand.” There is something so magnificently personal and private about writing how you feel about that special someone using whirls and loops in ink from an old-fashioned fountain pen.
Even more catastrophic is that Gen Z never learned to read cursive. And therein lies a tale of lost civilized behavior that may never be recovered.
With the development and prominence of technology, cursive has become increasingly obsolete, but what impact will this have for the future?
According to The Atlantic, this means, “In the future, cursive will have to be taught to scholars the way Elizabethan secretary hand or paleography is today.” This directly impacts archival work. Many written documents from the 19th century and other early time periods are written in cursive. While it was once taken for granted that American students would know how to read cursive, now that cannot be the case.
Archival work largely depends on a reader’s ability to read hard-to-read texts in shorthand and/or cursive. Will this mean that universities will start having to offer college courses in history programs on how to read cursive? Only time will tell.
The villain in this tale of the evil destruction of a treasured way to communicate is Common Core. And with most records stored in cursive, it begs the question of who is going to read about the past if it’s only available to a select few who can read cursive?
