A couple of nights ago, I was at a meeting, and a friend told me the most depressing story. I was chatting with one friend, and it turns out his father owned an aviation business here in Colorado, and helped start Centennial Airport.
My other friend, Bob, and his wife, are originally from Canada. Bob overheard the discussion, and offered up that Cheryl’s father was a flyer for the RAF during WWII, and they have his flight logs. They had sent them to his daughter, thinking she would find them interesting.
Turns out, she complained, she couldn’t read them. They were written in cursive, which is no longer taught.
Many of us fret about losing cursive as a writing skill, but it hadn’t occurred to me that by doing so, we’re also losing it as a reading skill.
Not teaching cursive, apparently, puts whole centuries of archival material outside the access of the current generation. Entire swaths of our history await scanning, where they will be ripped free from the moorings of their context, or they become the province of specialists. So much will become unintelligible, and personal histories like diaries or those flight logs will just end up in the trash.
That seems to me a great loss.
