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Advocates for learning cursive (including Idaho representative Linden Bateman, 72) argue that "more areas of the human brain are engaged when children use cursive handwriting than when they keyboard."

Bateman continues, "The fluid motion employed when writing script enhances hand-eye coordination and develops fine motor skills, in turn promoting reading, writing and cognition skills."

And if that's the reasons schools taught cursive, sure, fine. That's great. Also, there are plenty of other ways that kids can develop hand-eye coordination that doesn't involve spending a year of their prime development time learning a new alphabet.

But Bateman also argues that forgoing cursive may have much more consequential results: He argues we "will lose the ability to interpret valuable cultural resources-historical documents, ancestors' letters and journals, handwritten scholarship - if they can't read cursive."

"The Constitution of the United States is written in cursive. Think about that," Bateman said.

The Constitution of the United States is also available online, typed out. Not in cursive. Soooooo...We're probably good.

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Cursive Handwriting Will No Longer Be Taught in Schools Because It's a Big, Old Waste of Time - E! Online

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Advocates for learning cursive (including Idaho representative Linden Bateman, 72) argue that "more areas of the human brain are engaged when children use cursive handwriting than when they keyboard." Bateman continues, "The fluid motion employed when writing script enhances hand-eye coordination and develops fine motor skills, in turn promoting reading, writing and cognition skills."

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Teaching connected-style handwriting, otherwise known as cursive handwriting, has fallen out of fashion on many school curricula. Older generations have sometimes been shocked that some younger people today can't sign their names on official documents or even read a handwritten note.

Canadian provinces have seen a decline in teaching and learning cursive. In Ontario schools, for example, teachers might introduce cursive, but it's not mandatory.

Such a development is reflective of larger trends of focusing less on teaching and assessing handwriting for itself - and more on what it's communicating.

Alberta's kindergarten to Grade 9 curriculum, for example, stipulates that students learn to "listen, speak, read and write" and also envisions outcomes that require printing, such as connecting prior ideas. But the curriculum doesn't mandate assessing printing skills themselves. In Alberta's 2018 new draft curriculum yet to be implemented, cursive is mentioned, but it's not identified as a competency.

Beyond a nostalgia for the pre-digital age, there are good reasons why cursive handwriting needs to make a comeback. As a researcher who has studied the relationship of handwriting to literacy, along with other scholars, I've found that developing fluency in printing and handwriting so that it comes automatically matters for literacy outcomes. Handwriting is also an elegant testimony to the human capacity for written literacy and an inspiring symbol of the unique power of the human voice.

Too difficult?

In today's age of digital literacy, many think handwriting is irrelevant altogether and a waste of precious instructional time. But touching a "d" on the keyboard, for example, does not create the internal model of a "d" that printing does. Keyboarding can wait.

Some may associate cursive with any number of outdated formats of handwriting that may have indeed seemed like a curse to master - loopy, twisty and hard on little hands in terms of muscle movement and also for visual memory.

But handwriting is only difficult if it is not automatic and, in turn, offloaded into long-term memory. Evolving research in the neurosciences underscores the importance of developing automatic skills in relation to what educational psychologists call the cognitive load.

Lessons learned from sports or the performing arts highlight the importance of establishing neuronal connections that promote fluid movement. With reading and writing, too, the keys to unlocking creativity or interpretation of story elements are also related to being able to write automatically.

Lack of fluency

By Grade 4, the cognitive demands of curriculum quickly accelerate: students must produce more, faster and better. Students who have fluent handwriting consequently have more working memory capacity available to plan, organize, revise and retrieve sophisticated vocabulary.

In a study I conducted with my colleagues of about 250 Grade 4 students in an Alberta school, we found that only about half of the students in our study achieved the necessary threshold in handwriting.

These children's handwriting was insufficient to communicate the complexity of vocabulary and ideas expected in Grade 4. Most students had vocabulary they were not able to mobilize onto the page. Students' failure to reach the required threshold of expression at this level is associated with a phenomenon recognized by researchers as the Grade 4 slump, a drop in outcomes from which students may not necessarily recover.

Improving literacy outcomes

Schools must and can do better, starting early. The key is not only teaching cursive, but a greater focus on all printing to cursive handwriting, spelling instruction and fine motor skills. These developments are essential for literacy foundations in the kindergarten to Grade 3 years.

Read more: Summer play that enriches kids' reading skills - 8 fine motor activities for little fingers

Building on these earlier skills, the key to improving academic outcomes in Grade 4 is teaching young students to connect their letters, resulting in a style of handwriting that is legible and fluent.

Steven Graham, an expert in special education, writing and literacy at Arizona State University, advocates for beginning with printing or "traditional manuscript" and transitioning to what he calls mixed mostly manuscript, whereby the child is learning a continuous stroke.

Similarly, an example from early literacy scholar Sibylle Hurschler Lichtsteiner of Germany shows a transition from manuscript letters to joined letters. It evolves naturally, with support, from children's initial style of print in grades 2 to 3. Once young students have internalized stable, mental models of letter shapes, they can generalize and recognize various types of cursive script with a bit of practice.

Power of the pen

Testimonies draw attention to the power of cursive handwriting. The film Saving Private Ryan made famous the historical Bixby Letter written to the mother of sons killed in the American Civil War. While historians debate whether Abraham Lincoln or a member of his staff actually wrote the letter, ongoing interest in the letter through history suggests how human handwriting conveys personhood, care and captures imagination.

In our own era, Malala Yousafzai, the youngest Nobel Peace Prize laureate ever, reminds us:

"One child, one teacher, one book and one pen can change the world."

Although Yousafzai first came to global attention via blogging, through her book Malala's Magic Pencil she suggests a connection between the elegance and craft of a child's handwriting and their personal agency.

Yousafzai's handwriting has become a symbol of her advocacy. It demonstrates the power of written literacy, its intimate relationship to human identity and existence and its potential to remind the world of ultimate belief in human agency for good. Generations before, the young diarist Anne Frank did the same.

Our society impoverishes children if we don't learn from those who have gone before us. People who learn how to spell and to develop legible, fluent handwriting will have tools at their avail to confidently express themselves and circumvent inconveniences like losing power on one's digital device.

It's high time to put cursive skills back on the curriculum across Canada.

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Why cursive handwriting needs to make a school comeback

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Developing fluency in handwriting matters for literacy outcomes, and handwriting is an elegant testimony to the unique power of the human voice.

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Should All Schools Teach Cursive? (Published 2019)

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A 10-year-old cursive champ makes an argument in its favor. Is he convincing?

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Why don't the common-core standards include cursive writing?

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Should schools teach cursive handwriting? The question is a polarizing one in the K-12 education world.

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When Jack Lew was nominated to be Treasury secretary in 2013, President Barack Obama joked that as a condition of the appointment, Lew would have to learn to sign his name more legibly. The secretary's signature, after all, was going to appear on US currency.

Lew, a New Yorker, was a city public-school student. And now the school system that produced him is hoping to iron out that particular wrinkle for any future potential Treasury secretary: New York is bringing back cursive instruction.

Thanks to our education system, few Americans are learning cursive, and thus, are unable to legibly sign their own names. As the federal government has become more involved in the day-to-day workings of the American classroom, a focus on test prep has become teachers' main objective. That means useful skills that fall outside the testing pattern often are neglected.

Which is what makes a decision last week from the New York City Department of Education so refreshing. When federal education standards called Common Core were adopted by the city, penmanship classes were dropped. But the current instructional handbook includes a manual for teaching cursive, and according to NBC4, many schools have already begun to implement cursive instruction.

They should be cheered for it - even if they don't grasp just why it's so important.

In a statement last week, Nicole Malliotakis, a Staten Island assemblywoman who pushed for the change, said the reason to add cursive was so that students would "know how to write a signature of their own to identify themselves, and have the ability to sign a legal document, check or voter-registration form."

But this policy change is actually more beneficial for the students than school officials appear to realize. Learning how to write cursive isn't just useful for its own sake - as valuable as it is to be able to sign one's own name.

As the city Department of Education rightly pointed out, "evidence reveals an advantage for handwriting using pen and paper over keyboarding for students in grades 2 to 6 for amount written, rate of word writing, and number of ideas expressed."

In other words: Kids were better at processing information when doing so by handwriting as opposed to typing.

In addition, scientific research (and common sense) indicates learning how to write cursive helps the development of motor skills. Writing for Psychology Today, Dr. William Klemm explains, "The benefits to brain development are similar to what you get with learning to play a musical instrument."

These benefits apply to writing more generally and cursive specifically, according to Klemm.

That's because in "cursive writing, compared to printing . . . the movement tasks are more demanding, the letters are less stereotypical and the visual-recognition requirements create a broader repertoire of letter representation."

Yes, kids could use a computer and type more legibly than they can write. But the end product is just as important as the lesson itself. Test prep and academic pressure are increasingly crowding out previously essential classes like music, art and physical education. Recess has been shortened considerably for children compared to their parents' generation, as has instruction in subjects not considered "core curriculum."

There's a larger point here: Cursive writing is far from an exception. Teachers and school administrators have learned both through studies and their own experience that, for example, the erosion of recess time has negative effects on student behavior and performance, never mind happiness. Activities tossed overboard for their perceived frivolity turned out to have a point.

Reverting to older methods of education isn't the "hipsterization" of the classroom. Instead, it's educators merely casting off prior poorly researched and executed trends in education.

The New York City Department of Education might have taken only a small step in that reversion with its decision to restart cursive instruction, but parents should cheer it nonetheless. Perhaps it's the beginning of a curriculum counterrevolution that will restore a sense of balance to children's education.

And if not, well - at least future Treasury secretaries from New York will be able to sign our currency with pride.
Bethany Mandel, a stay-at-home mom, is a senior contributor to The Federalist.

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Why we should teach cursive writing to all kids

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When Jack Lew was nominated to be Treasury secretary in 2013, President Barack Obama joked that as a condition of the appointment, Lew would have to learn to sign his name more legibly. The secretary's signature, after all, was going to appear on US currency. Lew, a New Yorker, was a city public-school student.

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English Alphabet Diagram in Cursive Handwriting Poster

The English alphabet, both upper and lower case letters, written in D'Nealian cursive. The grey arrows indicate the starting position for each letter. For letters which are written using more than one stroke, grey numbers indicate the order in which the lines are drawn. The green tails on the front of several of the letters are for connecting them to the previous letter; if these letters are used to begin a word the green portion is omitted. Image reproduction rights can be found in the link near the bottom of this description. Sign up to Mr. Rebates for FREE and save 12% on any zazzle order in addition to a $5.00 sign up bonus All Rights Reserved; without: prejudice, recourse or notice (U.C.C. 1-308) Image Reproduction Rights: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cursive.svg cursive writing alphabet handwriting "english alphabet" "uppercase letters" "lowercase letters" numbers "d'nealian cursive" "upper and lowercase" "cursive chart" "cursive diagram" "cursive handwriting" "cursive writing" "school chart" "school diagram" "teacher's aid" "teaching tool" "communications class" "2nd grad" "english chart" "english diagram" "basic writing" "basic communication"

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English Alphabet Diagram in Cursive Handwriting Poster | Zazzle.com

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The English alphabet, both upper and lower case letters, written in D'Nealian cursive. The grey arrows indicate the starting position for each letter. For letters which are written using more than one stroke, grey numbers indicate the order in which the lines are drawn.

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