Common Core tried to drop cursive and phonics. For me these are signs that Common Core had lost its way from the beginning.

 I want to present a case for cursive. It has a lot of benefits that most teachers have not heard about.

 This article on American Thinker lists eight reasons why kids need cursive. These reasons mostly revolve around precision. Students have to do things in a certain way. In general, our Education Establishment tends to prefer sloppy, too much of which is a bad thing. Even if a child never used handwriting in later life (preferring, for example, a word processor), the benefits are still considerable. You have to look at the shapes of letters. You have to observe details. You are drawn into aesthetics. You are drawn into the world of typefaces and graphic design. The brain is forced to be more careful, more agile, more exact. Our students need a lot more of that.

  This discussion can be approached from another direction. What, after all, are most of our students doing in the early grades? Very little, that's my impression. Millions are not learning to read, that's for sure. They hardly know how to do basic arithmetic. Many schools don't want to bother with geography and history. So the proposition that the schools are just too busy to bother with cursive seems to me especially fatuous.

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article: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2016/12/why_the_education_e...

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