A couple of nights ago, I was at a meeting, and a friend told me the most depressing story. \u00a0I was chatting with one friend, and it turns out his father owned an aviation business here in Colorado, and helped start Centennial Airport.<\/p>\n

My other friend, Bob, and his wife, are originally from Canada. \u00a0Bob overheard the discussion, and offered up that Cheryl\u2019s father was a flyer for the RAF during WWII, and they have his flight logs.\u00a0 They had sent them to his daughter, thinking she would find them interesting.<\/p>\n

Turns out, she complained, she couldn\u2019t read them.\u00a0 They were written in cursive, which is no longer taught.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Not teaching cursive, apparently, puts whole centuries of archival material outside the access of the current generation.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 So much will become unintelligible, and personal histories like diaries or those flight logs will just end up in the trash.<\/p>\n

That seems to me a great loss.<\/p>\n

 
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