Good question about learning

Quora sometimes has a question worth thinking about.

Do people need to forget old things so they can learn new things (new knowledge)?

First impulse: Yes, especially with skills. When you’ve mastered an inefficient process or poor word usage or poor posture, you need to abandon the old movements or shapes to get into the new.

Second impulse: Maybe not. Maybe we leave the old in place and add a layer of translation, like adding a wrapper or shell around legacy code. Here’s a good example.

= = = = = START 2016 REPRINT:

Got thinking again about the fantastic Ivison cursive that was simply the way their invoice clerk wrote things, then became a trademark of the store, then became the store’s specialty. They switched from school textbooks to cursive guides and pens.

I never learned Palmer or Spencer. We were trained in an awful squarish form that may have descended illegitimately from Palmer. A lot of people in my generation stayed with the ugly cursive. I departed from it in 7th grade. Miss Collins, a young and beautiful history teacher, used an Italic form that fitted a left-hander better. So I spent 4 years using the ugly square form then imitated Miss Collins and never went back.

Just for fun I tried to bring it back:

Amazingly this system that I used from 1959 to 1962 is still immediately available. Didn’t even have to transition into it. Just decided to write that way and it worked. Makes me wonder: has this ugly system been living in my nerves for 53 years like chickenpox, always forming the base for my scribbles, getting ‘transposed’ into the Collins Italic form?

Looking at this sample objectively, it’s prettier and MORE LEGIBLE than my current scratching. Maybe I should switch back!

Much later: A news feature on reintroducing cursive in schools showed the exact same script we learned, with a caption “Zaner-Bloser Cursive Alphabet”. An appropriately ugly name for an ugly script. Google shows that Zaner-Bloser is a school supply company making good money from spreading this ugly script through books and study guides. An exact parallel to Ivison & Phinney!