Two and a half years ago, I presented a carefully thought-out argument for not requiring schools to teach cursive, calling it the equivalent of teaching about slide rules. I expected praise for my insight, but instead was berated as a dunderhead by more readers than I can count.
The blowback wasn’t merely from don’t-diss-my-childhood old folks, as you might expect: Teachers praised cursive writing’s benefit as a tool for perfecting fine-motor skills, historians lauded its ability to link us to the past and artists praised its ability to bring aesthetics into daily life. Eventually, the state legislature and Chris Sununu joined in, tweaking RSA 189:11-c to mandate “instruction in cursive writing” along with multiplication tables by the end of fifth grade.
It was all very compelling, but I was unconvinced. The cost of spending time on cursive rather than something else was too high, I said.
Yet now, after watching the technologies called artificial intelligence undermine human interaction and seeing the pleasant results of removing cell phones from schools, I think I have changed my mind.
It’s true that cursive is outmoded as an information processing device, but I’ve come to realize the drawback is more than outweighed by the fact that it is a very human information processing device. Creating each line is something you can feel in your muscles. Every sentence we write is unique to each of us in a way that no ChatGPT prompt can hope to equal.
In an era when algorithmic slop is taking over the infosphere, handwriting is more powerful than I realized it was.
I’ve also come to believe that the time-consuming difficulty of cursive is part of its advantage, forcing us to think and act more carefully when expressing an idea. Years of instant videos and voice-to-text and other super-easy ways of exchanging information have shown that faster isn’t always better — often, it’s worse. Stepping back to inefficiency can be an improvement.
Don’t believe me? Look at our public schools this year, where pretty much everybody is delighted that smartphones are now banned. Kids are talking more at lunch, they’re interacting with each other and they’re paying attention far more than when they had an instant connection to a global information system in their back pocket. It’s kind of amazing how well the change has gone, even though it seemed like a regression.
Getting more people to write in cursive won’t be quite as amazing, of course, but it would be something: a small step toward realizing that moving fast and breaking things isn’t always good in life.
So, yes, I was wrong before. We should teach kids cursive and encourage them to use it, at least part of the time.
Having said that, I think going back to using quill pens dipped in ink pots would be a step too far. Just in case you were thinking of where to go next.
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