Cursive Writing Makes a Comeback as Schools Reintroduce It into the Curriculum
History we don’t want to repeat
Not everything can be typewritten.
Texas schools got a lesson in education when they tried to remove cursive writing from the curriculum.
As a teacher, I was recently preparing a lesson for students, and a colleague mentioned that students might not be able to read cursive writing.
I was shocked, thinking the teacher was joking at first.
Quickly, I realized this was not a joke.
That colleague was going to type an excerpt from a text so that students could read it.
The excerpt I was using was short, perhaps twelve lines, so I decided to proceed with the comparison exercise and monitor how well students could read it.
I was surprised to see that they struggled.
Some students said, “I can’t read this.”
Others said, “Reading this is hard.”
When I inquired further about what made it hard, students replied that how it’s written makes it hard to read.
I pressed a little more: “Is the content or scrolly writing making the selection difficult to read?”
