Editorial: Cursive Questions

The Kansas Board of Education is debating whether or not cursive writing should be a required part of the elementary school curriculum. The issue surfaced in the November Board of Education meeting, but they voted to postpone a decision on the matter until the next meeting on Dec. 11 and 12. It was originally a response to an inquiry from several of the board members about how handwriting is being taught in Kansas schools.
Cursive is not required in the Common Core standards; instead, Common Core focuses its writing requirements on keyboarding skills. In Kansas, individual districts have the power to decide whether or not to include cursive in the curriculum. Some schools argue that the skill is no longer necessary. Schools should include cursive in the curriculum, but it shouldn’t be a top priority.

These days, college applications, tests and assignments can be done without pencils or paper. As technology becomes a bigger part of everyday life, kids are writing by hand less and typing more.

According to Kansas Board of Education member Walt Chappell, “Technology is great, but it doesn’t always
work.” He says that there are some situations in which knowing how to read and write in cursive is necessary. For example, a basic understanding of cursive is necessary to sign your name, read documents like the Constitution and communicate with people who still use cursive. The next generation wouldn’t be able to read old journals or recipes without knowing cursive.

One argument in support of cursive is that it adds personality and individuality to writing.

As California high school language and composition teacher Eldra Avery told the associated press, cursive is “part of your identity and part of your self-esteem.” Without knowing how to write in cursive, the next generation would not be able to sign their names in cursive. This leads to another potential problem: the increase of forgeries. Since print writing can be more easily reproduced, people would be able to more easily copy a printed signature.

According to Steve Graham, an education professor at Arizona State University who has studied handwriting instruction, people judge work on the quality of handwriting. However, Avery described her students’ handwriting as “deplorable.” According to her, a major cause of this is that students aren’t writing in cursive anymore, and she adds that although they learned to write in cursive in second grade, very few of them do anymore. Avery thinks writing in cursive would benefit her students because it would allow them to get more words down when they have to write three essays in two hours in her class.

In an experiment conducted by neurophysiologist Jean-Luc Velay at the University of Marseille, two groups of adults were taught a foreign alphabet: one group learned it writing by hand, while the other learned it on a screen. Several weeks later, both groups were tested over the alphabet. The results revealed that the adults who learned the alphabet by hand did better on the test than the ones who learned it on a screen. Brain scans of the hands-on adults showed more activity in the part of the brain that controls language comprehension and fine motor skills.

Teachers need to continue teaching cursive and encouraging more pen-and-paper writing. Cursive should be taught so that students are able to read and write cursive and so that they do not rely on technology to fix their mistakes. We shouldn’t let cursive become a thing of the past.