by Tim Holt
Here is a little game you can play with your coworkers: try to find a document at your work that is written in cursive from beginning to end. Go ahead. I will wait.
How many did you find? I suspect that it was very close to zero. And no, that little pink Post-It note love letter from the person four cubicles over doesn’t count.
Here is the next game you can play: Try to remember the last time you had to read a document that was written in cursive. Go ahead, I will wait. Was it last week? Last month? Last year? Can you even remember a time?
Here is another: When was the last time you were asked to write something in cursive for your work? Received an email in cursive? Read a book in cursive? Read a road sign, a billboard, a loan application, a mortgage, a car lease, a divorce decree? The truth is, unless you have a job as a calligrapher, you do not need to use cursive writing at all in today’s modern world. Writing in cursive simply is a skill that is no longer necessary in today’s world. Sorry, fans of longhand. The ship has sailed. The train has left the station. The toothpaste is out of the tube.
You are reading this online, in print type, where I would venture to guess nearly 100% of the writing is presented in non-cursive format. Have you been negatively impacted by that fact? No, you don’t even realize that nearly all writing is in print format because print is so ubiquitous. Thank you, Mr. Gutenberg. Your revolution is nearly complete.
Yet, despite a nearly 100% lack of any kind of need, kids in elementary schools all across Texas have to learn cursive writing as part of the adopted English Language Arts TEKS. We might as well be teaching spinning yarn and dyeing wool while we are at it.
Proponents of this “kids need to learn a dead skill” initiative cite several reasons for bringing it back. The first is the disproven notion that students need to know cursive writing in order to read historical documents like the Constitution. (Debunked here about 11 years ago: https://tinyurl.com/nocursiveever) In fact, you don’t need to know how to WRITE in cursive to READ in cursive. Those are two completely different skills. A student can be taught to read cursive in about 30 minutes. You don’t have to know calligraphy to read the Coca-Cola logo, do you?
The second is that learning to write cursive somehow improves hand-eye coordination in little ones. Perhaps this is partially true, but so does learning to play an instrument, painting a picture, drawing, and playing video games. Data from research indicates that cursive writing has no greater benefit to students than any of those activities, yet we don’t have “video games” as part of the standard curriculum.
So why did we insist on bringing it back like a bad TV show revival?
The TEKS, those standards that your child is mandated by law to learn and school districts are obliged to teach, are not free from political influences and pressures. What your child learns in school is subject to legislative arm-twisting, lobbying efforts by hundreds of organizations, and hearings by multiple committees and departments. In a red state like Texas, we often are pressured by lawmakers to return to a fantasy world that never existed, where white mom stayed at home dutifully vacuuming the carpet daily, white dad brought home the bacon, and all the little white children were above average. You remember those days, don’t you? Those days were the days when all the little white children learned how to write in cursive, so that they could send white Grandma a Christmas card each year, handwritten, making her so proud.
You remember, right? No, you don’t. Because it is a fantasy.
The problem, of course, is that world didn’t really exist, except in the imaginations of politicians who continually mistake ’50s and ’60s TV sitcom families for reality. The fact, separate from the fantasy and the voices in their heads, is that many of the skills taught back then are not needed today. We taught Latin as a matter of course in many schools “back then.” We don’t teach Latin, except in some select places, anymore. And good riddance. Latin is dead. Sumus quod sumus.
Cursive writing was put back into the TEKS because of some crazy longing for “the good old days” that really never existed except in the minds of east Texas rich Republicans that contribute to the Greg Abbott reelection fund. Qualem blennum!
Cursive writing, like Latin, is nearly dead. Even the State of Texas thinks so. Want proof? After 5th grade, there is not a single TEKS that revisits cursive writing. Not one. In any subject. In other words, this important “skill” is completely ignored after students leave elementary school, never to be seen again. That is 4 years (2nd-5th grades) that are wasted on a skill of very little value other than to make some east Texas blue-haired ladies whose mothers taught elementary school in the 1950s happy. For the next seven years a child is in school, they will not be asked to write a single thing in cursive.
Not. A. Single. Thing.
Teaching cursive handwriting should go the way of the educational Dodo bird. We have quite a few of those dead skills and classes that we, as a forward-thinking society, have tossed aside because time and technology have made them useless. Slide rules, keyboarding, “Home Economics,” and how to shoe a horse are among the thousands of things we have relegated to the dustbin of educational history.
It’s time we send cursive writing there as well. Let’s teach kids skills that they actually will need to succeed in their futures, not some politician’s fantasy past.