Why, in France, was there an emphasis on cursive handwriting when it's harder to read, and is it the same throughout the Anglosphere?

Question

In France, I was taught to write in cursive when I was six to ten years of age (alongside vocabulary, grammar, grammatical conjugation and so on). Once I completed this instruction, I never thought of changing my penmanship style because that was what my maîtresses d’école had always shown me.

During my PhD, I happened to teach a couple of hundred of students at my university for three years and was extremely surprised by two statistics that I did not meticulously compute: they are only my own hunches. Please do not hesitate to correct it and add a reference.

1. More than 80% of the students I taught in France were not using cursive writing at all.
2. Nearly every time one of my students wrote something using (connected) cursive, their handwriting was harder to read than when they wrote something using (unconnected) block letters (“printing”, or sometimes “printscript” or “print script”).

Another statistic that I noticed is that the boys I taught usually used cursive more often than the girls did.

Also during my PhD, I decided to learn printscript, and after more than ten years of my father telling me that my handwriting is illegible, he for the first time said that I wrote something by hand that he could easily read!

My questions are:

• Why did my teachers never decide to teach another handwriting script (or “hand”) and instead always focused only on cursive if at the end more than 80% of my students did not use cursive for writing competitive exams?
• Is all this specific to France? Does it change for English-speaking countries? Are Anglophone students also always taught cursive handwriting at a young age, not just unconnected block lettering, and what are the reasons behind this?

Wikipedia says that writing in cursive is generally faster that using block lettering, but fastest isn't always best.

Answer 1

Teaching of cursive has been removed from the school curriculum in many parts of the US. But there have been complaints about that, and even petitions calling to restore it.

Answer 2

In Finland I learnt «kaunokirjoitus», cursive writing, in school around year 2000. The national curriculum was changed in 2014 so that teaching cursive writing is no longer obligatory. I am not sure what the currently taught handwriting looks like.

I am not aware of any gendered differences in whether people use cursive or not. The common belief is that girls write with nicer handwriting. I have not checked if anyone has researched this, but it might be cultural, a myth, due to maturing earlier and thus having better motor and cognitive skills while learning to write.

Answer 3

A clue might be the year(s) when you were about 6-10 and in which you learned cursive in school. The farther back this was, the more likely it is learning cursive. But not learning block letters seems to be odd.

In our "modernized" world cursive can be seen as an art (almost like calligraphy) more than a practical means of forming letters. Mainly because of the printing techniques making cursive obsolete (very hard to reproduce) or needed to be simplified to enhance legibility and maybe speed.

Also when filling out forms, cursive was banned at some point and with the need for machines reading those forms even more so. Same goes for written exams to a certain degree ("Make it legible to not loose points"; either by demand of the tutors or the students who cared about that themselves).

Also the use of cursive was reduced more and more because of the change in handwriting utensils. Pencils and biros are predominant and do not allow forming cursive nicely because of the differences in the tip (ball vs. some kind of diagonal cut). Having different pens just for being able to produce some semi-bold, black letter or gothic script is impractical (and also historically loaded in case of german "Fraktur" for example). I think this is the main reason, why only one "hand" is taught in school (besides block letters).

Also, the "hand" was in development over a larger span of time, think in centuries or so. Meaning, you were not supposed to learn more than the "current" hand of that time. Older "hands" were supposed to be outdated and "newer" hands were not developed yet.

Developing ones handwriting is also a very personal matter, reflecting a lot of the own character. This can't be normalized to a high degree, there is always a preference of style involved, especially in personal letters. This might account for the differences you observed for female handwriting and the small amount of people who still used cursive even in written exams.

It comes down to this:

• Cursive has lost a lot of its appeal over the centuries
• Cursive handwriting was simplified to a great extent
• Learning cursive is part of the school curriculum still
• Learning block letters precedes learning cursive
• Official demands and readability for machines limiting the use of cursive further
• Your set of data is limited, not representative (limited to your university) and a bias cannot be ruled out (preference of the individual)

Answer 4

It's the same in Turkey. I was taught cursive at primary school and never taught block letters. However I just started using block letters on my own (I think nearly all of my generation did). As we progressed through the grades, more and more teachers started using block letters on blackboards too so I think we naturally started to adopt it. I never see someone writing in cursive nowadays, even the infamous doctor handwriting is disappearing. Edit: I did a quick Google search and found out that in 2017, cursive was replaced with block letters in the school curriculum.