Should Schools Teach Cursive?

Allison: Cursive handwriting dates back centuries, but that doesn’t mean it should be a lost art. Knowing how to read and write cursive gives students confidence in working with historical documents such as letters, notes, and journals from the past. In addition to helping you read texts, knowing cursive has many benefits for your brain. Studies have shown that learning cursive stimulates parts of your brain not otherwise developed by basic reading and writing. It also strengthens your fine- motor skills and helps with letter recognition and reading comprehension. Personally, I believe that knowing how to read cursive helped me learn to read music when I played in my school band. Somehow, reading music and reading cursive feel very similar to me. Even if you prefer to print or type on a keyboard for most of your writing, knowing how to read and write cursive still has a range of benefits and should continue to be taught in schools. 

Thomas: I believe there are far more important topics for me to learn at school than cursive. My parents hardly ever use cursive anymore, and teens use it even less often. The majority of the writing we do for school involves typing responses on our smartphones and laptops. It makes sense to me that we should learn and use the handwriting that most looks like our typeface, by which I mean printing, not cursive. If some students were interested in learning cursive, it could be taught as an elective in middle school or high school. It could also be a class that history or English majors take in college to help them read old manuscripts and documents. But for the rest of us, it’s just not practical. For modern students, time in the classroom is better spent preparing for the future by learning practical skills like coding and financial literacy.