If a person cannot read or write cursive, are they "functionally illiterate?"

[hunter]

162. To be clear, I actually *can* read and write cursive.

And I know as much Latin as anyone who majored in Biology and minored in English will soak up by osmosis. I also know my way around the Bible.

You may question my language skills. An exasperated English professor once told me I write like someone with a head injury who learned English as a second language. That's not too far off the mark. I don't remember *not* being able to read but I do remember all the hours I spent with speech therapists, first through third grade, while the rest of my classmates were reading about Dick and Jane.



One of my kids is left handed and struggled with cursive but my wife and I didn't let them skip past it. We didn't torture them about it either.

Nevertheless I don't consider someone who has trouble reading cursive "functionally illiterate." If a job requires someone to read their employer's archaic form of handwriting then that's just part of the job, same as another job might require fluency in a second language. My wife is a front line health care professional and what fluency she has in Spanish has probably put her ahead of people who only speak English, especially in our community where 40% of the population doesn't speak English at home.

Here in the twenty first century I think the benefits of cursive writing are overstated. That's our basic disagreement. I am much more concerned about the functional innumeracy of the U.S.A. population. It goes well beyond the inability to count back change.

Computers are having an even bigger impact on writing in China where predictive keyboard and screen input methods are becoming increasingly sophisticated and possibly influencing the way people think, let alone the damage they are doing to traditional pen and paper handwriting skills.

It's easy to imagine a dystopia where computers can take some incredibly malformed germ of an idea muttered by an idiot and magnify it into a plausible manifesto.