Photo: Karine Germain
I saw that bad handwriting should be regarded as a sign of an imperfect education.
—Mahatma Gandhi
In an age when keyboards are the norm, handwriting seems like a quaint anachronism—and cursive handwriting even more quaint. I grew up learning cursive handwriting, but within a generation the art and practice of cursive has largely disappeared from schools and popular use.
What happened?
The majority of US states (27) no longer have a cursive handwriting curriculum. My wife, a middle school teacher, says that today less than 20% of her students can write in cursive. They just haven’t learned it. If they hand write at all, they use block letters. But they rarely write. The ones that do often produce a childish scrawl that would have embarrassed a 3rd grader 20 years earlier.
Why did cursive handwriting, once a central part of primary and secondary education in the US (and other countries) for over 100 years, disappear almost overnight?
In the US, Common Core is the main culprit.
Common Core is a nationwide standard of curriculum goals, focused on ‘college readiness’ and workforce preparation skills. Nearly every US state has adopted and uses Common Core.
While Common Core doesn’t mention handwriting (or cursive), it does mention minimum standards for ‘keyboarding skills’. And so, with the stroke of a figurative pen, keyboards became the critical means for classroom writing and communicating.
Now, 13 years later, laptops and devices proliferate public school classrooms, and are the conduit for student, teacher, and parent communication about homework, assignments, and grades. It’s uncommon for students and teachers in US schools to use handwriting: students don’t write assignments by hand, and teachers rarely write information by hand for students.
One unintended consequence of that technology: students, relying more often on ‘predictive text’ and autocorrect than spelling knowledge, are becoming much poorer spellers.
And the decline of cursive handwriting study isn’t limited to the US; Scandinavian countries like Norway and Finland have mostly ceased teaching it. Many countries (including the US), if they do teach cursive, use a simplistic ‘pre-cursive’ script that looks to older generations like printed letters connected together to appear cursive.
Palmer Method
What about adults?
In the US, it’s estimated that about 50% of adults can read and write cursive. Since adults tend to use devices and keyboards as often (or more) than children, it’s unsurprising that cursive has fallen into disuse. And as a generation of children has entered college and adulthood in the ‘keyboard’ age, handwriting is no longer a ‘necessity’.
One interesting result: students in the US are losing the ability to read historical documents. Former Harvard President and historian Drew Gilpin Faust, while teaching a seminar at Harvard, relates how a college student was giving a class report about a book he’d read. That book contained many illustrations of important Civil War handwritten documents—but the student couldn’t read them.
Evolving Styles
Cursive, like technology, has evolved with the times. There have been many different styles of cursive taught in schools. The earliest, Spencerian, was eventually replaced by the Palmer Method (considered faster and more able to compete with the proliferation of typewriters). I learned the Zaner-Bloser Method in school, which replaced Palmer in US schools by the 1950s. In the late 1970s, D’Nealian became the standard. And there are several other modern variations.
D’Nealian Cursive
So What?
With computers on every desktop—and in every pocket—it’s fair to ask ‘so what?’ If electronic communication is the norm for everything we do in daily life, both personal and professional, does handwriting (cursive or otherwise) really matter?
I believe so. Many others do too. There are crucial, well-studied benefits for fine motor skills and brain development. Writing by hand often seems to bring a focus that keyboards and technology never do. Waldorf schools—my daughter attends one—have long understood this, and put handwriting at the core of classroom work.
Time after time, studies seem to show the brain operates in profoundly different ways when writing by hand versus typing. This rings true to me: handwriting feels more in line with the pace of my thoughts. Typed words often come faster than the thoughts, so I end up with a lot of ‘words’, but not necessarily as much thought.
Many famous authors write by hand. Neil Gaiman, Stephen King, and Joyce Carol Oates all often write book drafts by hand before typing them up.
But this issue is hotly debated, though, even in the world of education. Thirteen years have passed since the adoption of Common Core, and the decline in cursive use combined with classrooms stuffed with technology has created a spectrum of opinions. Teachers are pressured by curriculum standards and goals and technology requirements; student’s lives are often lived online, with a keyboard rarely more than inches or a few feet away.
Spencerian Script
A Return?
Surprisingly, in the past several years many states have reversed course, acknowledging the loss of the practical and cognitive benefits of cursive handwriting. Since 2016, the number of US states requiring cursive instruction has increased from 14 to 23. In October 2023, California made cursive handwriting instruction mandatory in 1st through 6th grades.
I love writing by hand. Though I’ve used keyboards since the late 1970s, I grew up with cursive and handwriting as a key part of my student and early adult life. My daughter complains about learning and using it, but I’m glad that she has and doesn’t rely on just keyboards to communicate.
What about you? How do you write?