At the same time, the struggle for cursive became part of a growing, politicized nostalgia for a lost past. Within a decade, cursive’s embattled advocates had succeeded in passing measures requiring some sort of cursive instruction in more than 20 states. Its disappearance would represent a craven submission to “ the tyranny of ‘relevance.’ ” In the future, cursive will have to be taught to scholars the way Elizabethan secretary hand or paleography is today. Defenders of script argued variously that knowledge of cursive was “ a basic right,” a key connection between hand and brain, an essential form of self-discipline, and a fundamental expression of identity. Jeremiads about the impending decline of civilization appeared in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and elsewhere. Most of my students remembered getting no more than a year or so of somewhat desultory cursive training, which was often pushed aside by a growing emphasis on “teaching to the test.” Now in college, they represent the vanguard of a cursiveless world.Īlthough I was unaware of it at the time, the 2010 Common Core policy on cursive had generated an uproar. Handwriting instruction had already been declining as laptops and tablets and lessons in “keyboarding” assumed an ever more prominent place in the classroom. The students in my class, and their peers, were then somewhere in elementary school.

In 2010, cursive was omitted from the new national Common Core standards for K–12 education. In my ignorance, I became their pupil as well as a kind of historical artifact, a Rip van Winkle confronting a transformed world. Instead of the Civil War past, we found ourselves exploring a different set of historical changes. Amused by my astonishment, the students offered reflections about the place-or absence-of handwriting in their lives. What did they do about signatures? They had invented them by combining vestiges of whatever cursive instruction they may have had with creative squiggles and flourishes. Had I heard him correctly? Who else can’t read cursive? I asked the class. Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.

Print to cursive