No More Cursive, And Our Own Rosetta Stone

In the newly advanced Common Core, the national standard for education, there is no room for cursive handwriting.  It is on its way to obsolescence, someday archeologists will need the skill of reading cursive, just as those of the 20th century had to interpret hieroglyphics.  For that there was the Rosetta Stone that allowed archaeologists to interpret hieroglyphics   I wonder if hieroglyphics had as much variation as our cursive does?  There were no prescriptions being written by doctors in a nearly unreadable form.  There were no doctors.   

The diaries of those who wrote in hieroglyphics would have been difficult to preserve.  The notion of having a diary that only the writer ever saw was nearly impossible as well.  Imagine the teenage girl writing in her diary (secretly in her bedroom) using a chisel and a hammer.  "What's that?"  "Oh, it's only Alexandra writing another entry in her diary.   She'll finish it up, then put it in the stack of valuables set aside to go in the family mausoleum inside our pyramid.  I told her not to be so long-winded, those stones are piled up as high as the Sphinx."  Clearly there wasn't much room for diaries way back then, but when I was young, lots of people kept hand-written journals and diaries.  Who will be able to read the varied scrawl of so  many young people?  No worries about today, it's all on Facebook.

Then, of course, there are the great documents of the past centuries when cursive writing was all there was of written tradition.  Before the invention of moveable type, most everything was written in cursive.  It's hard enough keeping up with the evolution of language, but when you add in the relative few who will be able to read in cursive....  In the Middle Ages, the monks preserved much of the culture of the age writing everything in cursive.  Talk about the Da Vinci Code, whew.

I remember a sci-fi novel where an entire civilization was summed up by a hand-written grocery list.  What was it?  Oh yes, A Canticle For Liebowitz.  A monk in the future discovers the sacred shopping list—probably written in cursive—from the archive of the Saint himself.  I remember there was some hilarious misinterpretation applied to it, but at least they could read it!

I'm really worried.  I think our only hope may be Google.  If someone teaches cursive to Google, our history will be saved.  Future historians and researchers will not need the Rosetta Stone, the will just google it.