I remember sitting in my third grade classroom, with my pink backpack and organized pencil case, staring intently at the board. It was the first day of our cursive writing unit, and we were going through the alphabet—attempting to turn the block letters we knew into the loops and curls of cursive writing. The task was daunting, but we chipped away at the task letter by letter with the help of repetition worksheets. The next week, I remember seeing a fourth grader (someone, in my eyes, who was significantly older than me) working hard on the final copy of his essay—written entirely in cursive. This completely blew my mind: would I ever be good enough to write a whole paper using solely cursive letters? Is this what the adult world would be like? I pictured myself sitting at a desk in a high-rise downtown, dutifully writing letters in beautifully executed cursive handwriting.
Little did I know that third grade was essentially the beginning and end of my cursive career. Since then, I can count on one hand the amount of times cursive has been relevant to my life, which has been exactly three:
- Reading birthday cards from older relatives, which my parents still helped me decipher anyway.
- Signing my name on documents and writing that one cursive sentence on the SAT (which I will never understand the true meaning of).
- Dodling fancy designs to myself in the margins of my notebook when I’m bored in class.
Beyond that, cursive has not been particularly useful, and I doubt it will unexpectedly gain any degree of usefulness in the future.
So why, then, does anyone still teach it? That’s exactly what many parents, educators, and lawmakers have been pondering for the past few decades, and in some cases, the decision has been made to outright cut it from the curriculum. Since the year 2010, 45 states and the District of Columbia have adopted the Common Core educational system, which don’t require cursive instruction, but instead leave the decision up to the individual states. A number of states, including Massachusetts, California, and Georgia all have laws mandating cursive instruction, but many districts see no need to waste time teaching it when more emphasis could be put on typing instruction and other technological abilities. After all, we no longer live in a society that values penmanship as it once did—even your grandma is beginning to substitute letters (which you could barely read anyway) with emails.
Thus, the main argument against cursive writing is that it’s a much too time consuming and difficult thing to learn for the few rewards people reap from having learned it, especially in this increasingly digital age. But what are the arguments in favor of keeping this tradition? Well, on one hand we have aesthetics: cursive handwriting is beautiful and looks intellectual. It is also an homage to our cultural history, and even more importantly, the script in which our founding documents were written. Although we do not often go around reading the Constitution, the principle still stands. On a more practical note, a link between good handwriting and better grades has been discovered. SAT essays written in cursive receive slightly higher scores on average. Most formal documents still require cursive signatures. In addition, some educators report that cursive writing is easier for dyslexic students to learn because the pen moves fluidly instead of in short spurts, making troublesome words easier to grasp.
So when it comes down to it, what should we do? Third Grade Me would have been shocked to consider a world where cursive writing is obsolete, but Current Day Me wouldn’t be so surprised. Even though I have barely used it, I still feel nostalgic to learn some younger family members haven’t learned cursive writing—and yet, I know that typing is a vastly more important skill. Bottom line, there is no right answer; we will just have to see if those loops and curls stand the test of the burgeoning digital age.