A couple of weeks ago, I was roaming the stacks of my local public library. Over in the corner by the bean bags, a gaggle of Gen Alpha teens was talking among themselves, but still glued to their laptop screens. It appeared to be some kind of study group, overseen by an adult in his 30s who had to chide them every five minutes to keep it quiet because they were in a library.
It led me to wonder if some of the kids had developed mild Autism or Tourettes from excessive screen/technology use, as they weren’t speaking in a language remotely similar to English. Or just how, say, a decade ago, teens appeared to talk. They communicated purely through internet slang, odd noises, and random, inappropriate outbursts.
Skeeeeet! Ay-ay! Gyatt! Your mom, though.
The adult in charge was clearly over their antics, and later, when the group moved from the bean bags to a table, he tried to drop the hammer on them for being loud and rude. They still kept being loud and rude, though, and I began to feel second-hand embarrassment for the adult. This guy didn’t stand a chance against the internet-addled murder hornets.
I sympathized with the kids a little bit, too, because they didn’t strike me as bookish, and would probably calm down if they were exercising outside or playing a sport. I was also once an annoying high school freshman, and I know for a fact that I did and said things in public that rubbed adults the wrong way.
But I had a normal childhood, without 24/7 screen, smartphone, internet, and social media use. I had Facebook and Instagram at their age, but social media was an entirely different beast. Instagram wasn’t a flood of memes and reels. It was a simple picture blog. You could only see the cheesy, filtered photos your friends posted. Likewise, Facebook was not yet some diarrhetic slop stream. It was mostly pictures your friends posted, status updates, and birthdays. And, of course, there was no TikTok.
Further, there seemed to be more old-school traditions still widely practiced in society when I was young. Playing outside until dark, neighborhood block parties, family game and movie nights, sandlot baseball games, and picking up a summer job. More importantly, there were still old-school people who took no crap and gave no crap – unless someone truly deserved to be punished.
Maybe this is what the library goobers badly needed. Old-school traditions. No devices in the library. And old-school people. No talking in the library. They needed an old-school librarian to swoop in like a bat out of hell and shred them to pieces for being obnoxious. They needed to be yelled at, told to shut down their laptops and leave, or else go quietly find a book to check out.
Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro has the right idea. On Wednesday, Shapiro signed a law that requires a cursive handwriting curriculum in all public schools. Now that is old school. But I can already hear the groans of students … This is so useless, no one writes anymore … This is so hard … WHY?!
What these kids do not understand – and I don’t blame them for it at their age – but what they will come to appreciate as adults is that traditions, such as learning cursive, have a value that they cannot immediately see. Traditions get passed on from generation to generation in part because they might make us happy, they might teach us skills, or they might help us cope with daily struggles. They certainly make us feel human. Without the traditions and continuity from prior generations, we would be robbed of so much wisdom and so many skills.
I would love to go back now and relearn cursive. To engage in a physical act away from a screen, to create something aesthetically pleasing, like a nice, curvaceous sentence, to concentrate and practice, and feel rewarded for it when a tricky letter comes out perfectly.
Cursive might not be practical in adulthood, but the value, perhaps, is in how it makes you feel. How it teaches kids to develop attention spans outside of phones and screens, how it rewards diligence and hard work, and how it tickles the creative parts of the brain and allows you to express yourself without punching keys or tapping screens.
Kids badly need it. They badly need other old-school traditions. And they badly need old-school mentors. Otherwise, we’ll keep having generation after generation of tabula rasa: blank minds and blank imaginations, with no wisdom and no respect for people in the real world, nor the people who came before.
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How do young people sign their names today? Is their signature in print!!?? It just dawned on me that it must be! Could they decipher John Hancock's John Hancock? And most of them can't read a non-digital clock! I recently watched a video of two teenagers trying, without success, to dial a number on an old rotary phone. I don't see any of this as progress. I may well never do it again but today I offer kudos to Josh Shapiro. Bring back cursive nationwide! I (barely) recall learning cursive in elementary school, early/mid 70s and recall being very nervous about the requirement in the next grade that ALL assignments MUST be done in cursive. We all survived. As a left-handed person it was a bit tougher but I managed.