It’s weird to think that kids in the future will find our writings and be unable to decipher them. They’ll hold up our papers, turning them in their hands, and wonder what our strange and curling method of producing words is all about.
They won’t know anything other than print. Their lives will be ruled by sans serif fonts and picture messages. Data will enter their brains as memes.
They won’t be taught cursive in schools and might not even be taught to use a pen and paper at all. Everything will be buttons and swype and “Alexa, lights please.”
The future is an as yet undiscovered country. And we’re driving straight into it and our brakes our broken. It’s forward momentum all the way, with no rest stops or chances to acclimate.
It’s like driving your car into a deer on a darkened road in the middle of nowhere.
What do you do?
When you have a box full of college ruled paper that has been written from one pink line to the next, how do you find someone to transcribe the words if they’ve never learned to read cursive?
Taking away a child’s ability to read would be a tragedy that parents wouldn’t stand for. But making one method incredibly unpopular? That’s easy.
And in the end, the future could be like in “Idiocracy,” when all anyone can do is point at pictures and grunt. And history isn’t something people bother to rewrite… because it won’t have existed at all. Because the words will be unreadable, language will shift and change, and the instructions on how to survive the apocalypse will be scrawled in a notebook somewhere, in cursive even worse than mine.
