Cursive writing on decline in some school districts
Muse Elementary School student Alanna Bevan practices her slants and swoops during her first lesson on cursive writing.
Muse Elementary School teacher Jessica Mascara explains the cursive handwriting workbook she created to her students. Mascara will teach the students cursive two times a week until April.
Brenden Lomago works on spelling the word “it” during his first lesson in school on how to write in cursive.
Muse Elementary School teacher Jessica Mascara helps Jennifer Bayer with her cursive writing during a recent class.
Logan Russell focuses hard on his cursive writing skills. The students started with learning how to write the letter “i.”
Second-grade teacher Jessica Mascara stood at the smart board at the front of her Muse Elementary School classroom and demonstrated how to write a proper cursive “i.”
“Start at the bottom line, swoop up to the top line, slant to the left, pick up your pencil and dot your i,” said Mascara. “Go ahead and do that five times. And make sure you have finger spaces.”
The boys and girls watched Mascara write the lower case “i” and then leaned over their workbooks, which like Mascara’s smart board had three lines – top, middle, and bottom.
It was their first lesson in cursive writing, and by the end of the session, the students celebrated a milestone: they had written their first cursive word, “it.”
Cursive handwriting, once a staple of American elementary education, remains part of the grade-school curriculum at Canon-McMillan School District (Mascara helped write Muse Elementary School’s cursive handwriting curriculum and teaches it two times a week, 20 minutes a session from November through April) but many elementary schools across the United States have dropped cursive instruction altogether as increased testing and computers in the classroom take more time and resources.
In 2011, Hawaii, Indiana and other states dropped cursive handwriting from their curricula to make room to teach keyboarding proficiency, and Philadelphia, Boston and Washington, D.C., are among the growing number of school districts that no longer require cursive writing or spend less time teaching it than they used to.
Common Core State Standards, used by 45 states and the District of Columbia, don’t even require handwriting instruction.
“Cursive writing truly is a lost art,” said Annette Vietmeier, director of curriculum, instruction and technology at Central Greene School District in Greene County, where cursive writing is taught in grades two through four. “Many school districts have eliminated the teaching of handwriting because of the rigor in the Common Core and the fact that it is not required. With all of the mandates, requirements, assessments and rigor in education, it is difficult for the education system to have enough time to do it all. But we at Central Greene have chosen to explicitly teach cursive writing at the elementary level as the benefits outweigh the limitations.”
Dr. Rosalie Carpenter, director of the elementary education department at Washington & Jefferson College, said many students at the collegiate level do not know how to write cursive.
“Many students come to us and don’t know how to write cursive. But we’ve been training teachers since 1781 at W&J, and we’re very serious about handwriting in the education department and all departments,” she said, noting that students often take notes on their laptops and other electronic devices.
Carpenter said elementary education students are required to use cursive writing to complete several assignments, including reflective journals, assessments and evaluations.
“Sometimes,” said Dr. Carpenter, “their signatures are so illegible we’ll have them do it again. You still need a signature today, even if you’re signing electronically at stores, so if we can’t read their cursive signature, we’ll make them practice until they write it legibly.” Proponents argue that cursive writing still has practical use today, beyond signing birthday cards and legal documents.
Dr. Linda Troost, professor of English and coordinator of the professional writing program at Washington & Jefferson cited studies that show writing things out by hand makes information stick in the brain in a way that keyboarding does not.
A study conducted by Dr. Virginia Berninger, a professor at the University of Washington and released earlier this year, showed that cursive writing boosts neural activity associated with creativity – specifically, idea generation.
Vietmeier agrees that cursive handwriting has educational benefits.
“Much research identifies speed and fluency of handwriting, which has a direct impact on writing development and literacy,” said Vietmeier. “Research shows that children are able to write more fluently and increase fine motor skills, and cursive writing assists students in creativity, brainstorming and retention of information.”
Mascara and Vietmeier both noted that children increasingly use technology at an earlier age – just look around a waiting room and see how many parents hand their children an iPad or telephone to keep them occupied, said Vietmeier – and Mascara said that fewer children write notes and letters using cursive handwriting.
“We can point out many benefits of email, text, etc., but there is still an interpersonal benefit to those who write and receive a handwritten note from someone,” said Vietmeier.
A handful of states, including California, Idaho and Massachusetts, have recently moved to make cursive mandatory. North Carolina passed a “Back to Basics” law which mandates that cursive be taught, and Tennessee passed a bill in 2014 making cursive mandatory from second to fourth grades. Ohio is considering a bill that would mandate handwriting, including cursive, from kindergarten through fifth grade.
And there’s another reason why Troost (a scholar of 18th-century literature and culture who needs to be able to read handwriting from earlier eras) and other advocates don’t want cursive handwriting to go the way of the abacus.
Troost says it’s important for students to be able to read cursive writing in order to read historical documents, ranging from the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution to letters and recipes written by their grandparents or great-grandparents.
“There are a lot of historical documents being put on the Web as parts of digital humanities projects. It’s ironic that easy access to such material should be coinciding with a decline in the public’s ability to engage with it,” said Troost. “Without a knowledge of cursive, we will be cut off from our past.”