Mental blocks

I attended the deposition hearing of a 16-year-old neighbor. As we were leaving the juvenile justice facility, his mother told me that if I want to write letters to him at his new school, I must not write in cursive because he can’t read it. “Every time he receives letters in cursive, he’s running around trying to get a translation,” she said.

Cursive, from the Latin currere, “to run,” has been employed in personal correspondence and formal documents for centuries, for its beauty. It was used before the Norman Conquest. William Shakespeare’s will is written in “secretary hand,” the European cursive style. But the same generation that casually did away with thousands of years of traditional marriage between a man and a woman has just as lightly cast off the tradition of penmanship you and I grew up on, like so much bothersome lint on a jacket. We have computers now, they grunt. End of discussion.

In a moment of sarcasm Job said to his know-it-all comforters, “No doubt you are the people, and wisdom will die with you” (Job 12:2). He may as well have been talking to the Common Core creators who in breathtaking historical hubris dispensed with the wisdom of the ages without so much as a field test by which to defend their experiment.

The year I was born, 1951, was the lowest year on record for breast-feeding in America. My mother told me that nurses fanned through the maternity wards handing out pills to dry up people’s milk. It was scientific and modern, you know. In subsequent years we learned that colostrum, that unduplicatable first secretion from the breast, is a super-rich cocktail of over 95 compounds benefiting the immune system, cell growth, fat utilization, DNA synthesis, and intelligence. Oopsies.

Does it matter to anybody but me that people won’t be able to read the Declaration of Independence in the original?

What could possibly go wrong with dropping cursive from your second-grade lesson plan (to make room for, say, tolerance and diversity training)? Well, for one thing, Sherby can’t read his mail from Aunt Bette in reform school, if anybody cares about that. Moreover, what if we have an electrical blackout someday and our computers are useless? What if we are on the road without our digital device and want to dash off a postcard with speed? Is anybody out there running algorithms on unintended consequences?

Does it matter to anybody but me that people won’t be able to read the Declaration of Independence in the original? Or that Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address will soon be like hieroglyphics that only a few octogenarians can decipher? Try doing a genealogy search of your family if you don’t know cursive. Baptismal documents, census notes, marriage licenses, cemetery records, naturalization papers, and pension applications will be Greek to you.

On the third floor of the dental school where I’m getting my teeth fixed is a museum. Behind a wall of glass there are shelves of gruesome primitive dentures and archaic operatory chairs, but also the Civil War–era letters of dental student John Foster Brewster Flagg to his sister expressing disappointment at not striking it rich in the California gold rush. Next to that are yellowed medical school notebooks on bacteriology. Do we want to give all that up for a mess of potage?

OK, so you don’t care about 19th-century orthodontists. But maybe you do care about your kids being smarter. Psychologist Stanislas Dehaene of the College de France in Paris concluded from his studies that “when we write, a unique neural circuit is automatically activated” (The New York Times, June 2, 2014). There are regions of the brain (the fusiform gyrus, inferior frontal gyrus, and posterior parietal cortex) that are dormant when you type or block print but are activated by the intensely collaborative effort of hand, eye, and brain in the small motor operation of forming continuous letters with your pen. Could that be the equivalent of the colostrum bonus in mother’s milk?

In August I sent a card to my granddaughter at her summer camp. As I was starting to address the envelope in the script that has been the matrix of social intercourse for centuries, I stopped in my tracks and switched over from cursive to block print. After all, what if a kid in the office assigned to delivering mail to the cabins is cursive-illiterate?

Email aseupeterson@wng.org