With 41 states adopting the Common Core curriculum standards*, the self-described Education Progressives are busy nailing the coffin shut on cursive writing in the United States, condemning the next generation to illiteracy. Centuries of empowering the masses by breaking the monopoly of court scribes by teaching the average man or woman and child to read and write efficiently and it’s “progressive” to dump all that achievement on the ash heap of history?

“…an Indiana clinical psychologist, said the time children spend labouring over script could be better used …”1

“… an education official in Lawrence Township, Indiana, said there were many more important things for students to be learning at school… “I think it’s progressive of our state to be ahead on this,” 2

Oh, better used on … what, precisely? Schools stopped students laboring over math calculations and now graduates cannot even add or subtract without the crutch of a calculator. Schools stopped laboring over teaching students how to spell – let the computer do that – so with a computer, a student’s term paper looks like a Hollywood multimedia production, but without a computer a student’s term paper looks like … well nothing… because the students of today cannot actually write, spell or form grammatically correct sentences with punctuation to produce a term paper without the computer doing all the fixing.

Schools stopped the labor of teaching reading so we see reports like this week’s “Half of Florida’s high school students fail reading test.” 3

Now the very same Education Progressives, firmly on a multiple decades losing streak of FAIL, firmly proving every single time they …  is there any adequate way to say it otherwise – don’t know what the hell they are talking about – are aggressively pushing cursive handwriting out of student education. On the very same grounds: ‘progressive’ and then ‘modern’ and ‘intuitive’ and then what should be the dead giveaway: ‘we don’t have time.’

Well how about making the time? They’ve got kids in school most of the day, most of the week, most of the year and they just don’t have time to teach cursive handwriting? Really? What are they doing all day long? They don’t seem to have time to teach math, either or reading or science … judging by our atrocious international rankings. They send three hours of homework home at night, so what’s going on all those hours in the classroom?

The current ‘education’ culture is driving our nation’s younger generation into the abyss, and instead of reforming is doubling down on failure with the Common Core Standards. And the word ‘aggressively’ is accurate. Parents who don’t agree are insulted, objections are sneered at, and plain historical evidence is dismissed.  The most effective mastery of academics is 3-fold:  audio/listening to lecture, visual/reading/writing and practice/practice/practice.   Photocopied hand-outs are no substitutes for  students writing out the notes themselves.

The truth is, the education progressives have been decades chewing at the hull planks in schools forming the narrative to justify jettisoning cursive off the sinking ship of American education.  Yet cursive writing is the key life skill for fast, efficient accurate note-taking -  useful in school, at home and at work.  So goes cursive so goes effective note-taking … actions have consequences.

In harmony with other countries, American education once upon a time (up until the mid-1960s) expected all students to master cursive early on, but the Official Progressive Idea introduced that it was ‘too demanding for young children’ so they bumped cursive aside for manuscript – that is to say ‘printing,’ starting cursive instruction later rather than earlier, in most cases not before grade three.

The oversized, simple printing we associate with ‘childish’ is literally an American Progressive Education Artificial Construct dating from the 1960s that from first grade severely handicaps American students compared to their age-mates in other countries.

An unsuspecting American parent looking at a European second-grader’s handwriting thinks it’s the work of an adult. Not only an adult, but a ‘smart’ adult!  The scale below has not been exaggerated: a standard piece of French composition page simply laid on top of a US composition page.  The first three lines of the French cursive are literally kindergarten-level,  quickly shrunk to the required scale below it in first grade.  The blue grid-lines are the standard format of French composition notebooks and lined notebook paper, providing superior page guidance than American lined composition paper.  The American composition paper used here was COLLEGE-lined, considered too small for U.S. Elementary and Middle School composition paper.

Source: Cahier d’ecriture GRAPHILETTRE CP-CE1 6 to 8 years old MAGNARD, Paris

While European students just ‘do it,’ Americans have been fed a false narrative that children don’t have the ‘development’  to learn cursive in first grade. Progressives heavily employ pseudo-psychological ‘clinicalisms’ on the public to promote what can’t be ‘education’ but ‘agenda’  to obliterating education expectations. They took away precise pencils and pushed clumsy and blunt crayons into little hands – coloring implements which are so awkward that even adults can’t use them with any degree of control, much less a child.  Now from the same rotted root source of ‘Progressive Education Theory’ Americans are being coached to abandon cursive altogether. Give it up, can’t be bothered, too hard.

Other countries every day prove the lie of the American Education Progressives with fewer hours, and no oppressive drudgery of after school homework in elementary grades, other countries’ schools continue to successfully teach useful handwriting skills, top math skills, top reading and rhetoric skills which empower students to achieve in higher academics and in advanced work opportunities in every field of endeavor in this modern world. Point this inconvenient truth out and the Education Progressives show their bankruptcy by a thousand and one excuses and a lot of aggressive and insulting remarks to denigrate the messengers.

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3. http://ca.news.yahoo.com/half-florida-high-school-students-fail-reading-test-232516894.html
1. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-14121541
2. http://www.gpb.org/news/2011/01/18/teachers-debate-keeping-cursive-in-curriculum
http://abcnews.go.com/US/end-cursive/story?id=12749517 Forty-one states have so far adopted the new Common Core State Standards for English, which does not require cursive. Set by the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) and the National Governors Association (NGA), the standards provide a general framework for what students are expected to learn before college.

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In a few weeks, at the end of the U.S. school equivalent of ninth grade, in June, all students enrolled in the French National education system worldwide are required to sit for the National Brevet Diploma Exam to demonstrate academic competencies in order to continue to the next grade, which would be ‘Seconde’ – the equivalent to the U.S. tenth grade level.

Students have two chances to pass, a fail generally requires repeating the ninth grade for another attempt. Students who pass continue study for three more years towards the Baccalaureate which is given at the end of the U.S. equivalent of 12th grade and is meant for entry to university.

A number of students pass the Brevet and simply graduate at age 15-16 with the Brevet Diploma, leaving school for work or trade schools, better equipped in math, reading and writing required for quality trade skills than their American counterparts who graduate  with a high school diploma two-three years later at age 18.

The Brevet is a required end of ninth grade exam, but exceeds most American high school senior requirements. Most countries in Europe have a very similar structure and expectations by grade for their students, so even though the French Brevet is used as an example, it reflects what is typical across Europe. French-speaking students, enrolled in certified French education systems in Africa and Asia all sit for the Brevet. It is administered in a manner similar to the SAT, everyone takes it on the same days, at designated testing venues, but unlike the SAT it is not optional and it’s not a computerized exam. Teams of teachers grade the Brevet exams of other schools; they are not permitted to grade their own students.

Students worldwide have just completed a practice exam, called the ‘white Brevet’ or ‘Brevet blanc,’ and have a few more weeks before the actual 2012 Brevet. It’s a two day exam, covering rhetoric (writing, reading, essay and grammar), history and math. There are no multiple choice or true/false questions, all answers are written out.  That’s written, as in cursive, which is being dropped out of many US public schools as the excuse goes … ‘irrelevent’ to modern life.  Calculators are allowed for the math section, but they are no substitutes for compasses, which most American students have never even held in their hands in 12 years of schooling, much less learned how to use to reproduce a complex geometric figure or simply demonstrate how to perfectly bisect an angle, something that the typical student outside the USA learns before 5th grade.

Above, the graphic shows a typical pair of geometry problems at the Brevet level. The English translation was added. The French have one standard for students, no ‘low’ ‘middle’ or ‘advanced’ separations as American schools have done. French and European students are competitive in math with Chinese and Japanese students, yet without the stressed, unbalanced, over-studying cram lifestyle that is such a problem in Asia.

Typical history/geo/social-studies questions of the Brevet (choose one):

1) What were the political entities which formed the Popular Front? What were the principal measures announced by Leon Blum? What types of obstacles did the Popular Front encounter?  Using the information in the documents provided and the information you know, write an argumentative paragraph of at least twenty lines discussing the successes and also the political fragility of the Popular Front.

2) What were the two great changes made by Mikhail Gorbachev to reform the Russian society? Define these in a precise manner. In what manner did these changes affect the political situation in Czechoslovakia? What were the changes going on in the Soviet block at the end of the 1980s? Which were the consequences of this revolution for the political career of Mikhail Gorbechev and for the USSR?
Drawing from the information in these documents and what you know, write an argumentative paragraph of twenty lines describing the end of the Soviet block from 1985 to 1991.

Language/Rhetoric composition: Brevet Level

“Jules was great friends with a soldier in the French army. His nephew decides to write about his uncle including how these two people met. Write, in the point of view of the nephew, a narrative of the encounter of these two characters.” Grading criteria: Complexity of ideas, the paragraphs are well organized, use the proper verb tenses (employ the correct usages of the verb tenses: imperfect, composite past or simple past), spelling, grammar and punctuation.

Source: Hachette 3eme Livre 2007

Regarding Math instruction:
The teacher, who has a demonstrated competency certificate in math, introduces a new concept to the class. He/she then explains and demonstrates the problem on the board, followed by a short lecture so the students write the lecture points into their notebooks, which are tightly supervised to be extremely structured and thus serve as excellent study guides. The remainder of the class is spent by students practicing working the problems at the board or in their notebooks under the supervision of the teacher. The teacher may assign a couple of extra problems for homework, requiring only a few minutes at home. No computers in the classroom, no teaching assistants, no ‘smart boards.’ The teacher grades all exams and checks all notebooks for neatness and completeness. Exams are not multiple-choice and require the frequent use of compasses, rulers, right angles, protractors … and erasers. The typical class size in better schools locally is 25-30 students, all handled by the teacher, no assistants.

Answers to the geometry problems in the graphic above:
#4: requires usage of the Pythagorean Theorem and the Theorem of Thales.
The Section A’B’C’D’ is thus a square with the length of a side x = (25√94) ÷ 47  cm

#5. Circumference C corresponds to the length of the circle 2(pi)R.  C = 2(pi) x 6370 = 12,740(pi) or about 40,024 km  … then  x =( 40 024 x 33) ÷360  thus length of the arc AB is 3669 km.

If your freshman, sophomore, junior or senior high school graduate cannot solve these problems or is not able to answer or write out responses appropriate to the history or rhetoric questions, then he or she, despite enormous amounts of financing to our schools,  did not receive training in a level of math, history and rhetoric required as national standards in most other developed countries at ninth grade … delivered at less cost, shorter school days, and far less homework.  The proposed national CORE standards double down on worthless, seemingly constructed by political ideologues who prefer to perpetuate ignorance in the classroom and ignorance of the reality outside our borders.  Our schools love to talk ‘globally competitive’ but don’t actually teach the nuts and bolts skills required for it: readin’, ritin’ and ‘rithmetic.  We haven’t even touched on foreign language requirements outside the Brevet … the students taking the Brevet are also required in 9th grade to study English plus another language such as Spanish or German.

And when was the last time our own school history textbooks put on their covers our victorious, liberatin’ American G.I Joe soldiers with guns getting hugged by appreciative, pretty French babes?  Our young teenage American male was quite surprised to see his textbook for 2011-2012.  History suddenly was a bit more interesting.

Source: Hachette Education 3eme, Source: Plan Brevet Maths 3eme Editions Magnard

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