As Alabama state Rep. That bill was signed into law by Gov. Robert Bentley, undoubtedly in a flourish of cursive, and went into effect in May But it was just one salvo in an old battle that is picking up a new head of steam. But removing cursive from school curricula is part of an ongoing evolution, according to Anne Trubek, author of the book The History and Uncertain Future of Handwriting.
That reasoning makes no sense, and it wouldn't make more sense if it were written out in cursive. Still unconvinced, I texted my mother, who is a strong advocate for handwriting. Here is what she said:. Jesus Christ, in ten years we will probably all sign everything with our thumbprint anyway.
I believe what is ultimately driving this obsession with saving cursive is the parents who believe that whatever they did, their kids should have to do too. Instead of going on a crusade for cursive, I propose that we make other essential skills mandatory.
For one, only 13 states required sex education to be medically accurate in Ohio and Alabama, two states that mandate cursive, are not on that list.
They and their coworkers interviewed 45 primary-school teachers in Quebec and France about how and why they teach handwriting. The results were sobering. Teachers had only sketchy knowledge, at best, of what research showed on the subject, especially when it came to the motor-function aspects of forming letters. Their views were, it seemed, formed primarily by the culture and institutional setting in which they worked. While Canadian teachers were fairly mixed in their opinions about whether cursive was harder to learn than manuscript, and which should be taught when, French teachers were fairly unanimous.
More than half of the Quebec teachers thought that learning manuscript first assists learning to read, while only 10 percent of French teachers thought so. In other words, teachers who are recommended by their education ministry to teach cursive, as in France, seem to become convinced that there are sound reasons for doing so, despite the lack of evidence.
And teachers in Canada who decide for themselves to introduce cursive as soon as possible seem likewise to believe that there are advantages that justify this decision. When I wrote previously for a British magazine challenging the hegemony of cursive, it received one of the biggest responses the magazine had experienced. Here are just a couple of the popular defenses offered for cursive:. But cursive is not another language. If you need to learn to read it, that takes an hour at most.
In the U. Manuscript, meanwhile, is only as childish as you decree it to be. Beliefs about cursive are something of a hydra: You cut off one head, and another sprouts. These beliefs propagate through both the popular and the scientific literature, in a strange mixture of uncritical reporting and outright invention, which depends on myths often impossible to track to a reliable source.
Take a article in The New York Times about the pros and cons of handwriting. This alluded to a study allegedly demonstrating that cursive may benefit children with developmental dysgraphia—motor-control difficulties in forming letters—and that it may aid in preventing the reversal and inversion of letters.
I was taken to a paper by education researcher Diane Montgomery, describing a study that used an approach called the Cognitive Process Strategies for Spelling CPSS to try to help pupils with spelling difficulties, generally diagnosed as dyslexic.
This method involves teaching these children cursive, with no comparison to other handwriting styles. It simply reports how, for children taught a new cursive style in Australian schools, faster writing slightly decreases legibility.
It describes a study comparing letter reversals and transpositions for 21 children at one school, taught cursive from the outset, with 27 from another taught first manuscript and then cursive.
So there we have it. It's something that's never sat well with traditionalists like Adam Brand, chairman of the British Institute of Graphologists. Among people like Brand, few things are as sacrosanct as cursive, also know as script. The formal style of writing is instantly recognizable from things like college diplomas and the Declaration of Independence.
Supposedly developed to preserve fragile quill pens , the writing has become scarcer in the United States in recent years. But even as its popularity wanes, science has good news for script's shrinking cohort. It could make you smarter.
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