Reply to Do you think it is important to know how to read/write cursive?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I have a friend who is a historian.  She says it's very ironic that soon we will be a country that cannot even read the documents that provide us with our basic liberties.

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What's ironic about this, exactly?

Do you know that the founding documents exist in printed form? Here's the Declaration of Independence, for example, as printed by July 6, 1776:

http://myloc.gov/Exhibitions/creatingtheus/DeclarationofIndependence/BattleJoined/ExhibitObjects/FirstPrintedVersionofDeclarationofIndependence.aspx

And do you know that the handwriting people used in the 18th century is not the cursive people teach (or used to teach) in schools today? Here's an online tutorial to teach you how to read the handwriting people used in the 18th century:

http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/palaeography/

And do you know that not being able to read historical documents is not some crazy failure of the school system that is unique to the US?

In Germany, for example, people born after World War II pretty much can't read anything handwritten before World War II (see here for an example of pre-World War II handwriting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:S%C3%BCtterlin.svg ).

And in Turkey, people can't read historical documents from the Ottoman Empire, because they are in Turkish written in a version of the Arabic alphabet, and since 1929 Turkish has been written in a version of the Latin alphabet.

Historical change -- it happens.

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