Bring back cursive
Far from an anachronism, practicing cursive handwriting primes children’s brains for learning — and a number of states are returning it to the school curriculum
With classrooms awash in technology, there has never been a better time to bring back cursive writing instruction to all public schools.
Surprised? You shouldn’t be: Cursive handwriting is making a comeback in parts of the country. Both California and New Hampshire in 2023 mandated that cursive be taught in elementary school. Twentythree other states already have done this, or never stopped teaching cursive when the Common Core Standards left it out of the curriculum in 2010.
Studies by researchers in Norway, Sweden and Japan have concluded that cursive engages the brain in ways that keyboarding does not. It primes the brain for learning by boosting fine motor skills and memory along with stimulating cognition. It also has a positive effect on students’ spelling and reading comprehension skills.
William Klemm, a professor of neuroscience at Texas A&M, explains it as, in his term, the “spill-over benefit” of using cursive: “To write in cursive, fine motor control is needed over the finger. You have to pay attention and think about what and how you’re doing it. You have to practice. Brain imaging studies show that cursive activates areas of the brain that do not participate in keyboarding.”
Cursive instruction has been pitted against keyboarding in the school curriculum. This is in part due to the belief that cursive is no longer necessary. Some educators and parents have argued that cursive is no longer used in our society, that it takes too much time to teach, that reading cursive is archaic or that signatures are no longer needed.
There is a lot of truth to those arguments. Typing and texting are our prevalent forms of written communication. But what is not debatable are cursive’s other lifetime learning benefits, including increased cognition and critical childhood brain development. Cursive shouldn’t be viewed as a competitor to typing skills, but as an asset in the learning of all subjects.
Sharon Quirk-Silva, the California assemblywoman who sponsored her state’s law to bring back cursive instruction, has brought up another important aspect: equity.
“We shouldn’t have some students who have been exposed to cursive and others for whom it appears to be almost a foreign language,” she recently argued in The New York Times Kids section. Isn’t that what the Common Core was supposed to provide, a set standard for all students?
What we’re taught in school can affect everything we may be able to do or not do later in life. Given the positive effects of learning cursive, it’s important that educators and policymakers understand what kids will lose without it.