So in the past few years, we’ve seen state legislatures introduce bills
that basically require that students have to learn cursive writing in elementary school.
Cursive handwriting is not in the Common Core state standards
which have replaced the English and Language Arts standards in 43 states.
And so this is led to a concern that if it’s not on the test,
if students can type their assignments or print their assignments,
cursive handwriting is just going to disappear and die out.
But the truth is, cursive was really fading out before the Common Core.
In 2006, the SAT started to require an essay -- and this is how we have data on
what students chose to write. And only 15% of students used cursive, this
was kids who were in elementary school in the 90s.
Cursive handwriting became taught more commonly at the same time that education
become more democratic. So it started with something called the Spencerian
script. If you’ve seen a college diploma, if you’ve
seen a wedding invitation with that really loopy, fancy writing, that’s what the Spencerian
script was. It’s beautiful. But obviously it’s not very practical to
learn to write this really gorgeous, loopy handwriting.
And so in the 1920s, which was when education was becoming much more universal, not just
at the elementary level but continuing on past that,
that’s also when they developed a new method of writing cursive.
It’s called the Palmer Method. Certainly if you have a grandparent with beautiful handwriting,
they’re probably writing the Palmer method. And there were two major cursive styles that
were taught from the 1960s on: The D’Nealian method, and the Zane-Bloser method.
This is a big debate. Is there a reason to learn cursive, besides sort of a nostalgic
idea that this is an important skill that you have as an adult?
The arguments in favor are that it’s a fine motor skill thing, it’s good for kids to
have learn to use their hands this way. And there’s also this sort of patriotic
argument that the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence are written in cursive, and
what if kids can’t read these founding documents in the original print.
The arguments against teaching cursive are mostly that nobody has shown that there’s
really a major benefit to learning cursive. So it’s a lot of time and energy spent in
the third and 4th grade, learning basically a second system of writing after you’ve
already learned to write.