“In the future, cursive will have to be taught to scholars the way Elizabethan secretary hand or paleography is today.” History professor and former Harvard president Drew Gilpin Faust bemoans the loss of cursive handwriting, not so much in terms of people no longer being able to write it, but in no longer being able to read it—which has implications for her (and my former) field and her students, in that a lot of historical sources are handwritten.
(My wife, a high school teacher, has been running into this problem: for the most part, not only do her students no longer use cursive, they have trouble reading her notes.)
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