Last summer, workers removing chalkboards from a high school in Oklahoma City discovered another set of boards hiding underneath. They had last seen the light of day in 1917. The boards were still chalk-marked with drawings, a calendar, and mathematics. But perhaps most striking were the writings—all of it in cursive.
As Sherry Kishore, principal at Emerson High School, said to the Oklahoman, “The penmanship blows me away … totally … because you don’t see a lot of that anymore. We have kids that come that prefer to print because they don’t know how to do cursive, and some of the handwriting in some of these rooms is beautiful.”
The words themselves are quite earnest:
The ACLU would’ve had a field day with this.
In any event, I point this out because a few weeks ago in the Washington Post, Joe Heim reported on the comeback of cursive. “Just last month, Louisiana passed a law requiring that all traditional public schools and public charter schools begin teaching cursive by third grade and continue through 12th grade,” he writes. “Arkansas legislators passed a law mandating cursive instruction last year. And 10 other states, including Virginia, California, Florida and Texas, have cursive writing requirements in their state education standards.”
And the reason for this resurgence:
I used to hate that much of my elementary Catholic school education was spent on penmanship. There were penmanship workbooks and exams, whereas students at other schools were learning a foreign language or pre-algebra. But now I enjoy being able to handwrite notes—and neatly for a southpaw, no less. I also recall a former colleague, younger than I, who never had to worry about a penmanship exam but whose handwriting resembled that of a child. It’s a bit embarrassing—just ask Bart Simpson.
Jan Olsen, president of the Handwriting Without Tears company, tells Heim, “If kids don’t have the mechanics, no matter what they’re thinking in their minds, it’s hard to get it on paper.” In addition, she says, “Handwriting is meant to be personal. That’s why a signature is a signature. Because nobody writes exactly like anybody else.”
Handwriting historian Tamara Thornton of the University of Buffalo, however, disagrees. “People do like to express their individuality, but they can do it in many ways,” she explains to the Post. “For all I know, people are coming up with their own emoji and maybe that will replace the signature.”
Can you think of a stronger case for cursive than that?
