In 2016, Democratic California State Assemblymember Sharon Quirk-Silva sat with then-California Governor Jerry Brown at an event where he signed bills. baseball-style cards featuring the image of his dog, Colusa.
But many of the cards’ recipients couldn’t read his cursive signature, Quirk-Silva recalled, much to the Democratic governor’s dismay. “The governor asked me what I did” before becoming a legislator, she recalled. “I said I was a teacher, and he said, ‘You need to bring back cursive.'”
After seven years of effort, she finally succeeded.
Last month, the California Legislature unanimously passed and Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a law requiring the teaching of cursive, or “joined italic,” writing in grades one through six.
While grandparents’ sprawling handwriting on birthday cards or treasured family recipes may come to mind when many young people think of cursive writing, some educators today think it’s a skill which deserves to be revived even – or perhaps especially – in an age when most children spend hours every day on it. their smartphones. But others think that students already have too many subjects to master and that their fingers belong on keyboards.
Some California teachers were already teaching cursive writing, but generally not in underfunded schools, Quirk-Silva said in an interview.
She argued that cursive writing is useful for reading historical documents, increases writing speed, and has become a popular way for teachers to ensure that students do not use artificial intelligence to write their written work.
Cursive writing instruction in public schools declined after the Common Core standards, adopted by most states, did not include cursive writing in the recommended curriculum. Critics of cursive requirements say class time could be better spent learning new skills such as coding and keyboarding. And Quirk-Silva recalled that some younger lawmakers called the loopy writing style “old fashioned.”
Its proponents have recently managed to bring it back, pointing to studies that show a link between cursive and cognitive abilities, including help with reading and writing disorders such as dyslexia and dysgraphia.
In May, New Hampshire Republican Gov. Chris Sununu signed a bill requiring schools to teach cursive and multiplication tables.
More than 20 states have implemented national guidelines for teaching cursive over the past decade, according to Connie Slone, founder of MyCursive.com, a company that provides cursive learning materials to teachers and schools.
A few others don’t require cursive writing but encourage it without a specific mandate, according to the Zaner-Bloser Company, another provider of cursive instruction.
But critics of cursive teaching remain skeptical. There’s “not a lot of evidence that cursive is important,” said Morgan Polikoff, an associate professor of education at the University of Southern California.
“If you have to spend time on written communication, keyboarding skills are more important,” Polikoff said. “In the context of educational policies, I’m not sure there is a single subject that matters less to me. We’ve fallen behind during COVID, we’re dealing with chronic absenteeism, student mental health is in crisis, and we’re spending time on cursive? Is this what we demand? »
This year, the Indiana Legislature and governor amended a bill that would have required cursive writing, changing it so that it now only requires a study on the use of the script cursive in public schools. A report from the Ministry of Education is expected on December 1.
In recent years, cursive bills have been introduced but not passed in several states, Slone said, including Colorado, Minnesota and Washington.
All founding documents are written in cursive. Where is our story if we can’t read this? Are we depriving future generations of our history?
– State Rep. Brenda Carter, D-Michigan
The late William Klemm, a professor of neuroscience at Texas A&M University, is widely cited by advocates for his article published a decade ago in Psychology Today, arguing that learning cursive writing “is an important tool for cognitive development. Cursive writing helps train “the brain to learn ‘functional specialization,’ that is, the capacity for optimal efficiency,” he writes.
A 2019 study published by PLOS One and listed in the National Library of Medicine, found that “there is growing evidence that mastery of handwriting skills plays an important role in academic success.”
And a 2020 study Norwegian researchers have established a direct link between “handwriting” and “synchronized activity” in a particular part of the brain “important for memory and for encoding new information and, therefore, provides the brain with optimal conditions for learning. » The study recommends that all forms of writing – print, cursive and typing – be taught to enhance “both cognitive development and learning effectiveness.”
Suzanne McLeod, educational leadership coordinator at Binghamton University, a state university in New York, said cursive writing became widely available in the pen and ink era, before This was largely because goose feathers tended to stain when removed from the page, she explained. This means that centuries of historical documents are written in cursive and historians must be able to read it to conduct original research.
“Not having a foundation in basic cursive where the letters connect would mean you would need some remedial action in that area,” she said. “You would find him absolutely inaccessible.”
In Michigan, Democratic state Rep. Brenda Carter this year successfully pushed through the House of Representatives a bill encouraging – but not requiring – the teaching of cursive writing. There was virtually no opposition, she said. But the state Senate never considered the bill before adjourning it.
Carter, who is set to leave the House after 2024 because of term limits, said she is seeking Republican Party support for the measure and is encouraged because the state Department of Education supported her.
“Our young people are missing out on so much,” she said. “All the founding documents are written in cursive. Where is our story if we can’t read this? Are we depriving future generations of our history?
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