Growing up, I had a pretty strange relationship with cursive writing.
This will likely sound familiar to many of you, but in the third and fourth grade, my teachers not only taught us cursive, but made it clear that literally everyone will expect us to use it when we get older.
While I can’t really recall if I was still using by fifth grade, I do know that after that, almost no teacher cared whether I used cursive or not. I seem to recall my eighth grade teacher briefly deciding cursive was super important, but I think that eventually stopped too.
In any case, I haven’t had to use cursive outside of giving my signature since, and that’s a fairly common experience among my age group. However, that might not be true in New Jersey if one bill gains the right amount of traction there.
Whether we noticed a downward trend in the use of cursive of not, it’s clear that education officials have.
As WSMV reported , cursive writing was dropped from Common Core standards in 2010 after many of our traditional reasons to use cursive were essentially replaced by digital platforms.
Once this happened, schools nationwide saw little reason to teach it.
However, it seems that some state governments do not want to see cursive go out like this.
According to CNN , Alabama, Louisiana, North Carolina, Arkansas, Virginia, California, Florida, and Texas all have laws requiring schools to reintroduce cursive to school curricula.
And if a bill introduced by New Jersey state representative Angela McKnight passes, we’ll be able to add the Garden State to that list.
As McKnight said, we are now seeing children enter middle school without knowing how to write their names in cursive.
And as she put it, “We are doing our children a disservice by not teaching them a vital skill they will need for the rest of their lives.”
Without learning to read and write in cursive, she surmised, these children would be ill-equipped to read scripted fonts in Word documents.
On a simpler level, she figured they also wouldn’t be able to sign the backs of checks.
Granted, checks aren’t as commonly used as they used to be.
Not only that, but even those who still accept them may not require people to sign the back of them.
Regardless, that’s not the only reason why some might want to bring back cursive.
As far as the International Dyslexia Association is concerned, cursive may help improve spelling, writing speed, and cognitive development.
As their website said , “When writing cursive, the word becomes a unit, rather than a series of separate strokes, and correct spelling is more likely to be retained.”
They also said that it’s more difficult to forge a cursive signature than a printed one.
In any case, after McKnight’s bill was introduced last month, it is now on its way to an education committee for review.
h/t: WSMV
