Should children learn cursive?

During discussions about cursive handwriting, it is difficult not to picture esteemed scholars scribbling away by candlelight.

Their work is doubtless important, but things have changed. Scholarship doesn't look like that anymore.

Refinement is no longer epitomized by elegant handwriting - neither in English nor in Chinese.

Surely cursive writing is nothing more than a hobby? A meditative, often beautiful pastime that has no place in the classroom?

It's fine if you want to send a letter to grandma or work on a piece of calligraphic art for your living room, but should all children be forced to learn such a potentially arcane skill?

In a busy timetable, cursive writing is often for the chop. Why not replace those precious minutes with time spent online, teaching kids something that might make them ready for the job market? Surely a child who can code is more impressive than one capable of beautiful copperplate?

The fact is that the world still hasn't quite abandoned the handwritten word. Under "normal" circumstances, all major universities still require at least one handwritten paper in each subject per year.

These papers are not brief. A two-hour exam usually means participants are expected to submit between 1,600 and 2,000 words in total.

Many students are so out of practice, they are advised to integrate handwritten papers into their revision schedule, giving them at least some of the physical stamina necessary to finish the final paper.

You can submit pages of partially literate scrawl, but you can be certain that a marker with barely 20 minutes to spend on each script isn't looking to waste late hours deciphering illiterate drivel. They are certainly not predisposed to award good marks to such a paper.

A surprising number of professions still require competent cursive.

A 2007 Time article asserted that doctors' sloppy handwriting killed 7,000 Americans annually. The same article claimed that 1.5 million Americans were injured by medication errors every year. Many of those mistakes resulted from unknown abbreviations or illegible scripts.

No country has the ability to entirely digitize their medical infrastructures - so for the time being at least, decent handwriting might save lives.

The majority of those working in the sciences still keep a handwritten lab book - documenting experiments, results and procedures.

In the case of forensic science, these records become vital legal documents, and keeping meticulous records is integral to specialist training.

Anyone handling primary sources or original documents (historians, political scientists and genealogists to name a few) needs to be able to not only read handwriting, but also engage with the obscure styles of the last thousand years.

At some point, this becomes a palaeographic concern, but what happens if you're ever interested in researching your own family history? Cursive writing can seem esoteric, but it has a far more expansive impact on contemporary society than might be supposed.

If you have any questions about our column, or the issues raised within it, please e-mail them to us: enquiry@brightentestprep.edu.hk