It helps with fine motor skills at a time that people are capable of learning them.

... And there are jobs that use those skills.

Correlation between handwriting, drawing skills and dental skills of junior dental students - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22269191/

My dentist, while teaching dentistry commented that if the student did not learn cursive in school, it takes them another 3-4 months of practice in order to acquire the fine motor control for holding dental instruments.

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robcohen 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

So the logical entailment here is what? That everyone should have the dexterity of a dental surgeon so we can save the 7000 dental surgeons 3 months of training? Am I missing something?

	▲	customguy 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		If everything is just extremes, then acknowledge that the other extreme then is everybody sitting on their ass watching "Ow! My balls!", clad in advertisements. And given the choice between those two worlds, yes, everybody should have the dexterity of a surgeon.
	▲	tazard 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Learning cursive won't automatically give you the dexterity of a dental surgeon, that's just a silly conclusion you have drawn from one example. What is the downside of learning cursive?

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encomiast 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

If anyone is interested, here is a link where you can download the study: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/221770027_Correlati...

I few interesting bits — it does involve cursive, but it's Arabic and it's graded on a rubric that includes things like "Presenting the beauty aspects of Arabic writing'. Also, given a sample of 71 students and a p<0.001 means the correlation coefficient only needs to be around 0.40 which means handwriting and drawing may only explain about 16% of the variance of these dental skills. That's not nothing, but given the subjective nature of the test and the confounders (does this handwriting sample really measure motor skills or maybe it measures care and attention to detail, or conscientiousness), I'd be a little wary of using this to argue for education policy.

Still, glad you posted it and glad I read it. It interesting.