Cursive

Cursive writing was once a beautiful thing to look at, with flowing streams of connected letters that kids spent months learning to do well. But cursive appears to be on the way out. Many school districts have decided kids don’t need cursive, and kids are more comfortable with the block letters that appear on computer screens and mobile phones.

But not everyone is okay with kids not knowing how to read and write cursive. A Louisiana state senator, Beth Mizell, has introduced a cursive writing bill in her state. She says she did this after a surveyor complained to her that he couldn’t find young people who were able to read the cursive writing on old land documents.

I have many old letters in my family, some of which were written in the late 1800s. All of them, of course, are written in cursive. I find them interesting, but if I couldn’t read cursive they would be meaningless to me.

I can recall, during my first three years of elementary school, sitting at my school desk and practicing cursive writing. Not only that, but teachers required kids to bring fountain pens to school. The use of ball-point pens was equated to  “cheating.” Ball-point pens were looked down upon. A ball-point pen was not a “real” pen – it was a gimmick. Every kid was expected to know how to fill a fountain pen from a little bottle of black ink. As old-fashioned as that sounds, at least we kids didn’t have to learn how to make our own quill pens from the flight feathers of a goose. Thank goodness for modern times.

Cursive writing will probably fall out of use before long. But can’t computers learn how to read cursive? Can’t we have a cursive-to-speech app on our phones? And how about a speech-to-cursive app? (For what reason I can’t imagine.)

I have a compromise suggestion. Don’t make kids learn how to write cursive. Learning that skill requires many hours of handwriting drills – hours that can be put to better use. Instead, let kids learn how to read cursive. Reading old documents like deeds and contracts will be useful to many kids when they become adults. Not everyone will need to know cursive, of course, just as not everyone will need to know trigonometry. But being able to read cursive seems likely to be a useful skill for far longer than people will be writing cursive.