Some states are requiring cursive again. This ASU professor says it won't make kids smarter
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Writing in cursive is pretty much a lost art these days. Since teaching it was dropped from the Common Core curriculum more than a decade ago, most kids haven’t been taught how to write in those curving, connected letters. And as more of us pretty much exclusively write on computers and phones these days, there doesn’t seem to be all that much use for it.
But none of that stopped the California State Assembly from passing a new law — unanimously — to require the teaching of cursive in public schools. In fact, the LA Times reports that lawmakers in nearly a dozen other states have passed similar laws mandating cursive.
There are arguments about its importance to intellectual development and kids being able to read historic documents. But Steve Graham says the push is largely about nostalgia.
Graham studies how writing develops and how we teach it. He’s a regents professor at the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College at Arizona State University. He told The Show that he’s more concerned with learning how to write well than learning how to have good handwriting.
STEVE GRAHAM: So there’s really two things. One of them involves Common Core. When Common Core came out and you took a look at handwriting, they mentioned only teaching handwriting in kindergarten and first grade. And traditionally in the U.S., that’s where we teach print or what some people call manuscript. And what happened is it got interpreted that since teachers weren’t being asked to teach handwriting in second grade, third grade and fourth grade — where we typically teach cursive writing — people interpreted that as we don’t need to teach this, and it’s dropped out of the curriculum.
The other issue or the second issue is that word processing has come to take up more and more of the kind of writing space when you compose. And so as a result, both at home and at school, handwriting has become less important.
LAUREN GILGER: Yeah, I mean, we type now and we teach typing now, right?
GRAHAM: Yes, we do. Although not all schools do that. And there’s some confusion about what grade to start in. But many schools start in second grade now.
GLIGER: Okay. So did that sort of replace when you would have learned cursive back in the day?
GRAHAM: You could look at it that way. But I think probably a different way of looking at it is that we teach one form of script, print. And we traditionally taught a second form of print, which would be, you know, cursive. And with Common Core, one dropped out, in a sense, the two are redundant. They both do the same thing for you. They get words on paper.
GILGER: So what do you think we’re seeing right now in terms of what’s happened in California and like a dozen states all around the country in terms of putting cursive back in the curriculum by law and and in a bipartisan fashion? Do you think there’s a turnabout happening here?
GRAHAM: Well, I personally think it’s a little crazy that you have legislatures basically legislating what happens in terms of the Ps and Qs, so to speak, in the classroom. An duty’re insisting that teachers through sixth grade teach a skill that is now less important and less commonly used. However, there does seem to be this nostalgia for cursive handwriting.
GILGER: So is it just nostalgia, you think? There are some arguments out there about the value of teaching cursive in terms of learning handwriting and intellectual development, right?
GRAHAM: Well, so if you look at the evidence, I think the best way to think about the effects of handwriting — whether it be print or cursive — is that it has an effect on the reader. If you’re reading text and print or cursive is not legible, then readers form negative ideas or propositions about what you’ve written. And if you can’t produce either in print or cursive text quickly, then it affects the writer. So all of us have had the situation where our mind is faster than our hand and we lose an idea.
This idea about intellectual growth, there’s really no support for that. Teaching handwriting doesn’t make you a smarter person.
GILGER: So do you think there is nothing really lost here in terms of of cursive going by the wayside?
GRAHAM: Well, I think I’m going to again, say there’s maybe a different way of looking at this. And that is we don’t have to teach print. We could teach cursive. Cursive handwriting today is pretty straightforward and simple. And some countries don’t teach print. They teach cursive. The issue really is, do we need to teach both of them in a very crowded curriculum?
GILGER: And curriculums are getting more crowded, right? What about this idea that there is a generation of students or maybe more who won’t be able to read historical documents or their grandmother’s recipe cards or what’s written on the back of an old family picture, that kind of thing?
GRAHAM: So that’s often brought up, right? And so I would ask you, when was the last time that you went back and read a historical document that was written by the Founding Fathers? And, you know, we can get it in print now. And it doesn’t mean because you don’t learn cursive that you can’t read. Cursive script is not an either-or thing. It’s more difficult to read. And quite honestly, grandmother is digital now. They use digital devices. So that argument — while is great for nostalgia — I don’t know that it holds much water.
GILGER: So cursive in particular, handwriting in general is less relevant, it sounds like, in your view today. But do you think this is the death of handwriting? Should we not really learn this anymore?
GRAHAM: No, that’s not what I’m saying. I’ve been asked this question for 40 years about the death of handwriting. And I sometimes snarkily say, can you tell me where it’s buried? You know, the reality of the situation is that much of the writing that occurs at school is by hand with paper, pencil and pen. And as long as that’s the case, handwriting is going to be important. Even when that is not the case, assuming that that happens, it’s easier to carry paper and pencil in your back pocket. It’s very cheap. I don’t see this tool going away completely.
GILGER: Do you ever, I wonder, talk to young people about this? In your work as a professor, what do they think about it? Do you know young people who never learned cursive and kind of feel like they missed out?
GRAHAM: Most of the students that I’ve worked with over the last 10 or 12 years, when this has become an issue, they don’t really think about it that much. You know, basically, in contrast to myself, where I print things out, I might write my notes out by hand, they don’t do that anymore. They annotate directly on digital documents. They deal and operate in a much more digital world. And so I think regardless of what I think or legislators think, these skills are going to become less and less important in the future.
GILGER: All right. We’ll leave it there. Steve Graham, regents professor at the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College here at Arizona State University. He studies how writing develops and how we can teach it well. Steve, thank you so much for coming on the show and giving us your take here. I really appreciate it.
GRAHAM: And thank you so much for asking me to do this.
