Saturday, June 1, 2013

The Value of Cursive in School

(This post was recently published on the site The Broad Side.  Some interesting writing over there in general and I have an open invitation to contribute there again, so check it out if you have time!)

A couple of years back I asked Quinn what he wanted to learn to write in cursive, and he said, "Everything!"  So I wrote out "everything," and he happily followed suit.


I've been dismayed by recent articles about how many schools have stopped teaching cursive.  My own children attend a public Montessori school where they start cursive in kindergarten, and I'm thankful that is part of their curriculum.

I understand the constraints schools are under anymore to teach a growing array of skills, and I'm sure finding time to have children do the repetitive work of learning to write clearly by hand may seem better spent on other things, but I'd like to take a moment to argue in favor of cursive.  I do believe it's worth our children's time.

The arguments against it are that people use electronic devices and keyboards now, printing is clearer, and that there is essentially not enough bang for your buck to warrant taking time for it in the classroom.  I would counter that cursive is practical, beautiful, and fills a variety of useful needs that should be embraced as part of a well-rounded education.

First of all, the technology argument is short-sighted.  It's simply true that sometimes you need to write by hand, and it makes sense to learn to do it in a way that is both quick and standardized enough to be understood by many.  Of course much of what we write anymore is done with some form of keyboard, but that doesn't mean it's all we should know.  That's like saying since most of us drive there is no point in learning to ride a bike or take public transportation.  Electronics break, batteries die, and if you have to leave a note on a stranger's car or under a door you need to know how to write on actual paper.  And there are simply some environments that don't lend themselves to using electronic devices for recording information.  My four years of violin making school with all my legal pads full of notes come to mind.  I transferred my longhand to my laptop at the end of each week, but my sketches mixed with written information were invaluable and I don't know of another way I could have captured all of that as efficiently.  Printing is nice, but slower.  There is no reason that cursive can't be just as clear when done with the proper care.  Not to mention at its best, handwriting is beautiful.

And the truth is writing, either in cursive or printing, takes practice.  You cannot expect to magically know how to use a pen or pencil without training the appropriate muscles and developing the proper eye-hand coordination.  You don't teach kids to type on keyboards and then assume they can suddenly use their hands for writing without practice.  There is great value in being able to transfer what you see in your mind to the page.  More people should be trained in basic drawing skills because that is extremely useful (and is another area of education that is too thoughtlessly dismissed), and I think writing for many is the closest many of us get to that.  If you develop the skills it takes to make clear curves and straight lines you have a lot of possibilities at your fingertips.  Why not do that by learning something as practical as writing?  Why would we deny our children the chance to develop a skill set that has so many potential applications?

Writing also helps you process things in a different way.  I know I make the most progress in teaching people to read music when I make them write it out themselves.  Just because someone's seen a treble clef and recognizes it, doesn’t mean he or she has ever taken the time to truly notice what it looks like.  Making my students think about it and engage different parts of their brain to write it out helps them learn.  Writing helps teach you how to see and remember.  I see the same kinds of benefits when my kids need help with spelling.  Writing words out carefully and well helps them learn.

I asked my children (one in fifth grade, one in third) what they think of writing in cursive at school.  They told me they prefer it.  Printing is slow, and when you are writing quickly is more prone to becoming unclear.  They said they liked the differentiated looks of particular letters (compared to printed letters like "b" and "d") and that individual words are easier to see since the letters are connected. They also thought it looked more sophisticated, and they had a poor opinion of most people's printing, describing it as babyish.  They could both name people in their classes who had handwriting they admired and they aspired to improve their own skills to that level.

Doesn't sound like wasted time to me.

And last but not least, handwriting is personal.  When you take the time to write certain thoughts down, the mere act of writing them with your own hands is powerful.  I have dozens upon dozens of fascinating, well-written, gripping, touching emails from my husband during his deployments to Iraq.  I am grateful for every time he took the opportunity to share those thoughts.  But I also have two hand-written letters just to me from that same period.  Which do you think I still reread?  It's not the same to print out an email that says, “I love you” that looks as if I could have written it to myself some lonely afternoon.  I prefer a piece of paper that was in Iraq with my husband, that he wrote on in his own slightly scrunchy handwriting, telling me he was thinking of me when he put that pen to paper.

An education that does not prepare children to communicate their ideas in a way that is powerful and personal, efficient and beautiful, is not a full education.  I'm glad my kids write in cursive.


  1. As a former elementary school teacher, I appreciate and agree with what you have written. However, as a public educator in a poverty stricken school where I was lucky if my children had a single book in their home, I had much greater worries than teaching cursive.

    I was under so much pressure by the state, not to mention our local school system, to meet certain standards (that quite frankly, some days felt nigh on impossible), that cursive fell by the wayside--since it's not a Standard of Learning nor tested.

    I was more concerned with my children learning to read and do math and that, quite frankly was quite the struggle some days, without throwing handwriting into the mix.

    I WOULD work on their cursive writing and it was fun for us, but I can own it and admit it was a back burner item, not something I thought about on a daily basis.

    1. Oh, that's just heartbreaking, Rach. I understand completely in a sink or swim environment you have to jettison everything but the most essential. I'm from Detroit, and I follow stories about how resources are so scarce (due to a dwindling tax base and major corruption) and they've cut everything from art to music to sports.... And I get the mentality but it leaves nothing left worth wanting to attend school for. It's horrible, and the inequity that exists in this country when it comes to education makes me angry. Children in need of the most resources are allotted the fewest. I don't understand that.

      However, most of the articles I've read about schools abandoning cursive are well-off facilities in places like New York where for a while I know it was "the thing" for your small child to have an occupational therapist because kids were arriving at school unable to work scissors or draw with a real crayon. Places where parents are saying, "My kid has an iPad, writing is unnecessary." Places where they could incorporate cursive into lessons and choose not to because parents don't see the value.

      My kids' school is not well-off financially. It's suffered a lot of cuts in recent years and we are in a rather working class neighborhood. But it is rich in terms of community involvement, so when art and gym were slashed, parent volunteers stepped in and kept them going in some fashion. I deal with a lot of families who rent violins on the wealthy end of town, and when I hear about their orchestra and theater programs I try to feel happy for them and not just all kinds of jealous but it's hard.

      But what the kids at our school lack in resources they gain in support at home and that makes a huge difference. Everyone is committed to making our kids' school experience the best we can. And maybe it works out for the best that since the classrooms can't hand every kid an iPad they learn cursive instead. Because even though we're an urban school in the most troubled public system in the state, there are waiting lists to get into it every year, and the test scores are among the best around (with 100% of the graduating 8th graders scoring advanced or proficient in reading year after year).

      Ideally, every kid should have the benefit of art, music, sports, home ec, shop, etc. in addition to core skills like reading and math. But when you are in an uphill battle with too many surrounding forces, your choices become limited. I get that completely. We shouldn't have a system that sets up limits on the opportunities our children have. It hurts us all in the end.

  2. Hi Korinthia. I found your blog from a comment you left on another blog (probably anymommy). I have read a few posts and I just wanted to say hi and tell you that I am enjoying your writing. Your coat post made me tear up a little. :) And while my kids are young enough that I haven't really considered cursive one way or another, I am pretty sure our local public schools no longer include it in the curriculum. If that's the case, you might have inspired me to see if I can teach it to them myself!
    Anyway! Thanks for writing.
    -Lisa K

    1. Thanks for the comment! And thanks for reading.

  3. Korinthia - there is no question that writing needs to be taught and cursive is part of the developmental step that all kids need to learn. Cannot imagine how any educated adult could think otherwise.

  4. I've given this a lot of thought and come to the conclusion that I would be sad if cursive got dropped... but I think it should be. I think keyboarding is more important for the time available in school. I've come to think of cursive like our grandparents thought of Latin. (How can the next generation survive without it?!) If someone is going to be a historian, or some similar profession, then they need to take cursive-- as an elective sometime-- not as required 3rd grade work.

    1. Thank you for your thoughts! Obviously I disagree. And I think cursive should be kindergarten and first grade work, not third, since I've seen it work out that way so well in Montessori teaching. By third grade doing keyboard work would be appropriate.

      But you know what? I wish I had had Latin! So I am a hopeless throwback on many levels, I suppose. My son was dying to learn Latin, but since I didn't have any experience with it I struggled along with him in the book we got and probably blew my chance to get him into it.

  5. As you know, our kids go to Catholic school and they start learning cursive at the end of 2nd and beginning of 3rd grade. Aidan and especially Damon loved learning it. Damon thought it was like a code and their handwriting in cursive is significantly better than their print. I've always wondered how kids how don't learn cursive will sign their names. We live in one of the top school public school systems in the country and they dropped cursive too.

    Of course, I also took 4 years of Latin in HS so I guess I'm really old fashioned. Aidan is going to take it too because he wants to learn it for scientific names for his herpetology. I also took Russian and Spanish, but it's really my Latin that has helped me the most (and it was fun!)

  6. I'm glad they teach cursive so young at the Montessori as well, but I do also wish they'd keep up with having kids practice it. I remember doing countless handwriting exercises and practice at school (through 2nd/3rd grade at least) to make sure I knew how to make my letters properly but I had to take matters into my own hands to save little Paul's handwriting. He seems to prefer the method of mixing some printing and some cursive, depending on which letters he remembers how to make. :) But I've been amazed at how a little bit of practice at home has made such a huge difference. This makes me wonder if he has a preference or if he's noticed that cursive can be faster. I'll have to ask him.

  7. I completely agree with you - I was pretty horrified when I read recently that many U.S. schools were no longer teaching cursive. Reading and writing in script is part of being a literate person. How anyone can think it's okay for schools to advocate partial illiteracy is beyond me.

  8. I learned cursive in school, as well, but the problem with cursive specifically is that it is but one of many calligraphic writing systems. I love and would support calligraphy in general being taught in a more general context of artistic and visual development, which has clearly seen short shrift in recent years. Traditional American cursive, however, especially with oddities such as a "Q" which looks like a "2", is a strange system for kids today to get their heads around, and other calligraphic systems, such as perhaps italic writing, should be emphasized instead.