Should Schools Bring Back Cursive Handwriting – INDIANAPOLIS – The handwriting for cursive may be on the wall in classrooms across the country, but an Indiana senator is renewing his push to bring it back to schools in the state.
Cursive has fallen out of favor among American schools in recent years, as an increased focus on technology has led them to choose a keyboard over teaching.
Should Schools Bring Back Cursive Handwriting
In 2011, the Indiana Department of Education decided to no longer require schools to teach cursive, joining 45 other states.
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That’s what prompted state Sen. Jean Leasing, R-Oldenburg, to introduce legislation last year to restore cursive to the state curriculum. He failed, but he’s trying again because it’s a skill he thinks kids will need as adults to read their bosses’ notes.
Some see cursive writing as a waste of time, an anachronism in a digital society where even signatures are electronic, but others see it as necessary so that children can improve their fine motor skills, improve literacy and develop your own unique identity.
Several states, including California, Georgia, and Massachusetts, added a sharing requirement to national standards, while many states, such as Indiana, Illinois, and Hawaii, left it optional for school districts. Some states, like Utah, are still investigating the matter.
Whether it’s necessary or not, cursive is quickly becoming a lost art as schools increasingly replace pen and paper with classroom computers and instruction increasingly focuses on academic subjects covered by standardized tests. Even standardized tests are on track to be computerized within three years.
Time For Kids
Cursive still has many fans, who say it’s good for teenagers’ brains, coordination and motor skills, and it also connects them to the past, whether it’s to handwritten historical documents like the Constitution or letters from parents and grandparents.
They say that a long hand is also a symbol of character, even more so in the monotonous age of email and texting.
Last year, the bill passed the Senate by a vote of 45-5, but it never came up for a House vote.
House Education Committee Chairman Bob Behning, R-Indianapolis, refused to advance the bill in 2012, saying at the time that he felt it was “inappropriate” for lawmakers to require curriculum in that particular way.
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The Indiana Department of Education eliminated cursive as part of its adoption of the Common Core curriculum, the standards that 46 states have agreed to follow. Common Core requires schools to teach handwriting, but leaves it up to schools to decide whether to teach students cursive in addition to print.
Common Core adds a new requirement that schools teach keyboarding, which some schools have replaced with cursive. But that does not prevent regions from demanding the teaching of both writing styles.
Leasing said he believes outgoing state Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Bennett’s opposition to the bill was the driving force behind its killing last year. He is looking to support his successor, Glenda Ritz. One of the most cited criticisms of the Common Core State Standards is that they do not require students to be taught to write cursive.
Some states, such as Tennessee and California, have added hyphens to the standards. Louisiana appears to have moved away from grades three through 12, requiring students to be taught in cursive each year.
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Proponents of teaching cursive say that students should learn it in order to read historical documents such as the US Constitution. Valerie Hotchkiss, director of libraries at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, wrote in the Chronicle of Higher Education in 2014: “Students will be at a disadvantage in researching literary texts and archival collections without knowing cursive. They can’t even read their grandmother’s diary or their parents’ love letters.
Others say that cursive helps students write faster than print and they need it for signature development.
So why don’t the authors include the normal italic core? In a recent interview, Sue Pimentel, one of the lead authors of the English language arts standards, explained that the decision was about priorities—and learning to use technology is a priority.
We thought that more and more student communication and adult communication is through technology. And knowing how to use technology to communicate and write was critical for students. The idea is that you have to choose things to put there. It was really a discussion.”
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Anchor Standard #6 for Writing demonstrates a technological focus and requires students to “use technology, including the Internet, to produce and publish writing and to interact and collaborate with others.”
“One of the things we heard from teachers across the country — in some cases, obviously not all — was that sometimes broken writing takes up a lot of instructional time,” she said. “You might as well spend your time on other things instead of having your students practice cursive writing. “It’s really about emphasis.”
Pimentel points out that the K-5 language arts standards require students to “print all uppercase and lowercase letters,” so handwriting doesn’t appear to have been completely removed from the document. He also notes that states have the ability to add standards, and that adding a hyphen is “very legitimate.”
It’s important to be able to read cursive, says Pimentel. But the authors did not think that this was a place where teachers should spend a lot of time and energy.
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“One of the things we thought about was that if we put in cursive, it’s going to be all this practice of forming your letters,” he said. “But if we didn’t have it there, it wasn’t because the teachers didn’t teach it, it wasn’t [as] emphasized.”
But what does the research say about cursive writing? Does this confirm the decision not to specifically require it in the standards?
According to Steve Graham, a professor of educational leadership and innovation at Arizona State University who has studied writing instruction for more than 30 years, research has shown benefits for handwriting instruction and practice in general.
The ability to write quickly makes it easier for people to put their ideas on paper. Students who struggle with handwriting, he said, “may have to devote other cognitive resources to that low-level task that takes away from other higher-level aspects of writing, like thinking about how you want to organize text.”
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Having good handwriting also helps students in school, where teacher surveys have shown that most writing is still done on paper. “Reasonable research shows that if your handwriting is not very legible, people will make judgments about the quality of your words,” Graham said. “A more legible paper will receive higher writing marks than a less legible paper of the same quality.”
There is also research that shows that people remember things better when they take notes by hand instead of a word processor.
While many people say that cursive writing is faster than printing because the writer doesn’t have to lift their pencil from the paper, research shows that this is only marginally true.
“Today’s broken versions are not yesterday’s booms,” he said. “They’re really simple… If you look at the data [on speed for print and cursive], it doesn’t look that different.”
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People also say that print is easier to read than cursive, but again, Graham says the research is inconclusive on this point as well.
“There is not much difference between the legibility of these two manuscripts and the speed of their production,” he said.
In a 2013 article for the National Association of State Boards of Education, Virginia Berninger, a professor of educational psychology at the University of Washington, confirmed this print versus italic finding. “No clear research evidence supports that one is better than the other,” he wrote.
However, Berninger also showed that print, cursive and keyboard activate different brain patterns, and in some cases, students with certain disabilities may struggle with print but do well with cursive.
Should Schools Bring Back Cursive Handwriting?
According to a 2014 New York Times article, some researchers say that cursive “may be a way to treat dyslexia.”
As Graham sees it, given the enormous time constraints teachers have, there’s really no reason to teach more than one style of handwriting.
Schools are being asked to teach typing. “Should they be required to teach cursive and cursive as well? … We want students to be fluent in at least one of those — which doesn’t make much of a difference.”
“It seems inefficient and a waste of time for students to learn both,” he said. … Which of those you teach should be the responsibility of schools and teachers.” While American students traditionally begin learning to write in print (as required by the Common Core), they may well start with cursive—as do young students in many European countries.
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“Teaching both of these handwriting formats has advantages, including learning to recognize and write letters, despite minor differences in the letter forms of the same name,” he wrote in the NASBE Commentary. Consider all the fonts that computer users can choose for word processing. Apple’s Steve Jobs was a skilled calligrapher before he pioneered technological tools to support writing—and this is one of
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