How old are you that your grandmother couldn't recollect cars on the road?

16 I betcha.

I'm 47. My grandmother was driving at 14. Her mom drove in the twenties. OP must be 70+.

I was told there would be no math.

He specified that when the grandma was his age... I'm a little too tipsy to play these math games... but the younger the op and the longer his relative took to reproduce is the easiest way for his statement to be true, I think.

Cut the shit, then. When was your grandmother born?

Nah, my grandmother was born in the 20s and lived in a rural part of the midwest. She saw very few cars as a child and grew up with horse and buggy. She died in 2005 in her 80s and never had a driver's license her entire life. I'm only 31.

By 1920 the automobile had surpassed horse and buggy.

Not everywhere.

That doesn't mean everyone had them. She was in a very poor family and lived far from any city.

Wouldn't really matter if the grandmother lived to 100 or older.

My GG lived to be 99 and drove in college. My dad is 73 and his grandmother had a car at 18.

Okay? If you're 105 today, that would put you into ~1913. Then, add in that OP's grand mother could've been from a rural area, and the math would check out. I'm not sure why all y'all are berating OP. There is substance to their post...

I'm totally not berating OP, and I mentioned it in a comment to him- there is something to talk about with the eradication of handwriting. I mean, I jump on that soapbox with such dedication that I homeschool my kids. But the post doesn't need histrionic licence to make the point.

I’m 66, my father was 46 when I was born, he was born in1910 in a rural area on the gulf coast. He was 8 when his father got his first car, his mother never learned to drive.

But they saw cars on the road, right? It wasn't horse and buggy days.

My father drove mules to plow and tend to crops. I’ve seen pictures of mules hitched to cotton wagons. They lived far enough out in the country that they had an arrangement with a family in town in which my father and his brothers milked cows and did chores for room and board. They would walk 7miles home on Friday night. With luck they would catch a ride with someone going over to the next town, get taken to the cutoff. When the price of cotton went up due to demand from WWI they made enough to buy a Model T. His father died within two years , a delayed victim of the Spanish flu.

Well wikipedia

Where did she live that there were no cars, then?

I get where you are going with the eradication of handwriting, but the car thing just isn't adding up.

My g-gma was born in Bevan, Ohio and drove a car in the twenties. Maybe she was extremely sheltered and never saw a road? Dunno.

I get where you are going with the eradication of handwriting, but the car thing just isn't adding up.

There are still people out there who are pretty old, meaning above the average lifespan of 78. I'm not an expert in it but I think for a lot of rural areas cars weren't as common as one might think. If we just use round numbers and pretend it is the year 2020 and chop 100 years off that we get to 1920. I think it is completely plausible that are still enough people alive that remember a time before cars were commonplace.

My family immigrated to the U.S. in the late 1800's and moved to about as rural area as you can imagine. They all worked and lived together on the same 160 acre farm and lived in a really shitty house (by today's standards) which over the decades became a nice house. My Great Uncle talked about when they put in real floors (that was a big deal) and they just added on to it over the years as the family grew and they had good years where money allowed them to make things a little nicer.

My point is, when I was growing up in the 80's I still had old relatives who could remember all of this and would talk about it like it was yesterday. What it was like to get their first tractor, car, etc. and a time when not everyone had a car or before you saw them everywhere. I also remember the random stories about how when they had their first car they found some way to jack it up and use the wheels to run a saw for cutting firewood which they all found to be amazing. Frankly, I find it amazing but because of the ingenuity of it. I wish I could have seen how they rigged that up.

Technology can move fast. The iPhone came out in 2007 and I have a niece who is entering her teens and cannot conceive of a phone that doesn't have a touchscreen. It literally does not compute in her head. She cannot imagine how a phone would have worked without one. I've seen her reach out and touch screens just assuming that everything always worked that way. She was also shocked that you couldn't pause live TV when at a summer cabin (because TV is what you should be doing at a cabin) and a million other things.

Very interesting question about seeing cars. Gonna ask my relatives if they know when grandma/grandpa first started seeing lots of cars. They were born before 1925 in a rural area, so it may not have been as wide spread back then.

I don't think it's as important to learn the fancy handwriting like we did in school, but now it seems they can't write at all. Self driving cars will be the next thing. Complete control over the movement of the population.

I got 2 notifications tracking me on 12/24 going to 2 different markets. Yes, food shopping. Young people cannot read or write, but they can text. Sad.

As a teacher, I prefer typing over writing.

However, it is still an important skill because ultimately if there is no technology we need the ability and discipline to write well.

I am pondering this further.

Handwriting is an important skill because a person must be able to create without the use of various technological crutches. Handwriting requires people to be able to spell and execute proper grammar using only their own abilities.

When typing, the computer will automatically fix spelling errors and offer grammar suggestions. People do not need to have a strong grasp of grammar. While grammar is sometimes superfluous, the reason grammar exists is to clarify what a person is writing. In my opinion the loss of strong grammar knowledge has led to a decrease in clear writing, which can lead to misunderstanding.

Additionally, people are losing the ability to write something correctly the first time. Computers have given us the ability to change what we type at any moment without consequence. Gone are the days when people tried to write well the first time because if they didn’t they would have to erase five sentences to fix one previous. I do not think that easy manipulation of type is bad, but I do think that it is something that should only be used after a person has a strong command of their language. This is sort of like not giving students calculators before they have learned their multiplication tables.

I think what the loss of handwriting equates to is a step back in terms of grasping language. I do not think that is a good thing because language is one of the most important aspects of being human. Failure to grasp and understand language leads to a failure to grasp and understand the world.

Granted, a whole lot easier not to write thing correctly the first time with todays modern digital typewriter machine using but, back in the day, isn’t this what was called a rough draft? Nobody did it perfect the first time that I ever heard of.

Even after 3 drafts, perfect writing is nearly impossible. The 3 draft system is itself a writing crutch. The point of writing practice is to give students the skill to write effectively the first time after the teacher had sent them off into the real world. The purpose is to be effective in the real world without writing crutches.

For example, I’m sure you didn’t go through three drafts to write your comment. Notice, the comment has a couple of errors where the reader has to assume what is being said. The comment is written well enough where a person can be 95% certain, but the comment does not stand on its own. It requires the reader’s own interpretation, which could be totally wrong.

Sorry to use a personal example. I’m not trying to attack anyone. I just want to maintain context.

I see handwriting as more important for math, to be able to write something down and use your brain to figure it out. My pennman ship and spelling was and is terrible. So I typed everything I could.

I agree.

Research tells us that hand writing (as in, not typing) has a more significant effect on the brain, engaging more areas and is associated with better learning outcomes.

The cost to schools would be too high for within 10-20 years.

Hasn't this already happened? There's an entire new generation that has grown up not knowing cursive.

Cursive isnt so important though, joining letters never made a whole lot of sense to me growing up although i still do it out of habbit a lot of the time

Used it a lot in college but now tend to write notes in all cap block letters. Or typing. Lol. But yeah, it's becoming a lost art.

Tis good for the brain:

https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2013/04/30/should-schools-require-children-to-learn-cursive/the-benefits-of-cursive-go-beyond-writing

Cursive is a leftover from times of quill and fountain pens that would drip when lifted from the paper. Continuous lettering kept the writing cleaner and more legible, but obviously this is no longer the case

They told me in middle school that in high school and college, everything had to be written in cursive. We learned cursive in kindergarten, before regular letters! Times have changed

Agreed, part of dumbing down of USA public schools. Thomas Jefferson should have printed. Today's school children can't read the constitution therefore no need to understand it. "No child left behind" means Class goes at speed of slowest member. Look up USA school scores vs Taiwan or South Korea, or Germany, or.....sliding over the edge fast. Unable to write (read) longhand closes the door to all the family letters written in the past. One way to destroy a heritage.

Perhaps a bit askew of the topic but just throwing this in re: the topic of handwritten things being safe: I've had my outgoing personal letters, (and two incoming packages) opened & stickered as inspected by the post office several times over the years.

Don't matter

Pen ink can be traced to a manufacturer, Which can be linked up to the storefront.

Same with paper too.

Paper and ink can be made by anyone. Do a web search for "homemade paper ink" and you should find plenty of results should you ever find yourself in a situation where you're worried about the manufacturer of your paper being discovered.

Mm good stuff, i've made paper..but i was thinkin more along the lines of needing to mass distribute a couple tonnes..

teach kids handwriting as a form of subversion

Handwriting isn't a necessary part of education beyond the basics of knowing all the letters and being able to read. In the future, people will likely be bad at it, as I'm sure I'm worse at script than people just 100 years ago, but merely being able to read should give a person the ability to make the same shapes by hand regardless. Or maybe they'll just spend more time on it to make sure they replicate the letters better. It's not like putting less focus on handwriting or cursive will make people unable to use basic writing tools. As long as we're all expected to read, we'll also be able to write, at least in as much as simple notes like you're describing.

Handwritting and cursive require practice and discipline. Why would we want kids associated with such things? Cursive is gone. It teaches one to think a few steps ahead. Why would we want kids to enter a state of flow, anyway ? People will be the only ones who can read their own writting. Want to document your ideas or thoughts? Just type it in to a machine. Where big brother can see it. Like a good boy or girl. Spelling tests are gone for many kids btw. When the wtiting utensils are gone, and calculators do all the math, drawing will soon fade away. Its not an accident.

As I was making out my Christmas cards to my neice and nephews I actually paused and thought "I probably shouldn't write this in cursive as I'm not sure they'll be able to read it all". Part of that is because I have shakey hands so admitably my writing isn't always perfect but in thinking about it I came to the conclusion that they wouldn't recognize at least 1/3rd of the letters and would probably only be able to read it by piecing in the bits they don't know.

I have noticed more than a few people my age (20's) with dogshit handwriting, I mean embarrassingly bad where the letters aren't the same size and it looks like a child's. When I worked at a car rental place I never saw that in older customers.