Whenever we had time left in my third grade class, we would take out our large, blue textbooks and carefully trace the swooping lines of cursive G’s as our teacher watched from her desk. To my younger self, this was a chore: unnecessary and unenjoyable. I could never get my handwriting to look like the fast, elegant style my mother used. I was embarrassed about my cursive handwriting and how it compared to the textbook. Eventually, I stopped trying.
Nowadays, learning cursive is on the decline in schools, but instead of eliminating it entirely, we should begin teaching cursive in art classes.
Cursive writing is culturally significant and supports mental development among younger kids, according to Psychology Today. Learning cursive allows students to read it more fluently, useful for older, handwritten sources. If I had never toiled over that dense, blue textbook, I wouldn’t be able to read my mother’s handwriting or decipher primary sources for history class.
This benefit also extends beyond English. Many languages that use the Latin alphabet have cursive, and in languages like Spanish and French, cursive is still common.
Currently, 21% of Americans are illiterate, and 54% of adults are literate below a sixth-grade level according to the National Literacy Institute. Instead of taking time away from learning essential reading and writing skills, cursive should be taught in art classes. It shouldn’t be a strict, rigid, required skill taught from textbooks, it should be an artwork, a way to foster a student’s creativity and supplement their developing writing skills.
Learning cursive as a skill has a positive impact on your brain. Cursive can help students learn words and remember them better. For younger students, it has been proven to aid with fine motor skills, stimulate the brain, and creativity.
Teaching cursive to students, especially in the younger years, is crucial for its continued use. As early as in 2012, a study found that out of a survey of 2,000 adults, two-thirds said they rarely wrote, and the average time since adults had last written by hand was 41 days.
Handwriting is a dying art. Cursive is no longer a requirement, so we should adjust our expectations to acknowledge this and, in school, reframe it as an artistic skill and keep practicing it. Let’s free cursive from the textbooks.
