Should handwriting be taught in school?

Common core is a complete wreck from beginning to end. Whether or not it teaches cursive is immaterial in the big picture.

I don’t want my kids spending any time at school learning handwriting.

I believe that we desperately need something in the grade school curriculum that strengthens the eye-hand connection and the skill of manipulating a tool beyond the level required to push buttons. Just grappling with the challenge of getting this simple tool—the pencil—to produce evermore faithfully a desired result establishes neural connections that will have much to do with how we relate to the material world. This is stuff that’s basic to what it means to be human, and I see it gradually being marginalized.

It doesn’t have to be handwriting. Playing a musical instrument would do this as well, as would many other endeavors. All of them require perseverance through the initial awkwardness, and the eventual discovery that what seemed hopeless in the beginning gradually responds to sustained effort.

They do… at my daughter’s school.

She has learned and used cursive since Kindergarten.
bragging moment: and she has beautiful handwriting

Also, since Kindergarten, she has had separate classes in Science, Spanish, Computers, Math, and Library. So it’s not as if the cursive time is taking away from other, more important, courses.

Aside from the actual handwriting, I think it teaches patience and a sense of craft.

@cookieman let me guess. Either she’s in a private school in the US, or you don’t live there.

@snowberry: ding ding
You are correct: catholic private school in the US.

They tried to teach me cursive and it was even less legible than my normal print. The neural connections that @thorninmud alludes to, I built in various crafting skills, and I think art classes would do better than handwriting to build those.

What I think is really needed is critical thinking skills and perspective; the ability to see beyond yourself, know how some things affect other things (cause and effect), and how to think in steps as opposed to half-assedly traveling the path of least resistance that usually leads to band-aid solutions that cause more problems than they solve. Education should be more than memorization and regurgitation; it should teach you how to think, and how to turn those thoughts into actions that lead to making the world a better place, or at least dealing with it easier. It’s not about getting kids to do well enough on tests to keep the federal funding flowing; it’s about preparing for life. And stupid people with good handwriting won’t improve the world.

I couldn’t write in cursive to save my life. Everyone told me “This is the most important handwriting of all! You’ll be expected to use it for the rest of your life!” And I thought I was doomed because I couldn’t do it. Especially those damn uppercase Gs. What the hell? They don’t even look like an uppercase G! I never really picked it up and I don’t use it today. Not one bit.
I hate reading cursive, though. I pretty much can’t. The letters look too familiar, especially between different people’s handwriting. The i, the s, the r, the e the l…They all look the same.

Seems that people that don’t learn to at least read cursive could be at a disadvantage. I honestly don’t care what they use to write – personal choice. However, I would be annoyed if I had to print instructions because someone couldn’t read cursive. It takes too long to print.

I consider this a basic part of learning to read and write. Yes, it should be taught. It was part of my curriculum in grade school as well as my daughters (public schools, not private). In fact, I don’t know a single person that was not taught cursive in grade school.

My cursive is horrible. I transferred after second grade from a school that taught it in third grade to one that taught it in second grade. I had to self teach over the summer.

Yet while I am not a huge proponent of cursive, I do believe it is important to learn to write by hand. There is a neural connection between the creative brain process and the physical act of writing it out by hand that is missing from the use of a keyboard,

So for me, no need to get knuckles rapped over teh Palmer Method, but definitely a need to ingrain the skill.

@dxs I don’t like the cursive upper case g either, so I use a bigger form of the lower case g. My lower case b looks like a printed b. I always found the cursive lower case b to be awkward. I have a mutated version of cursive although I believe it is legible.

My 9 year old daughter (almost 10) attends public school and they still teach handwriting. The students begin to learn at the end of second grade and then all throughout third grade. I’m all for it.

It is an out dated method, for a culture hanging on to something that means nothing. I would prefer that schools moved the time they spend on spelling and handwriting classes to teaching kids to read and write. Grammar is a huge part of our daily communications! Too many people sound terrible when they write.
For example, it is not always correct to say “Mike and I.” Depending on the sentence structure, sometimes Mike and Me IS grammatically correct.
My last name ends with an “S.” When most people make my name possessive, they add “‘s.” This is incorrect. If a word you wish to make possessive ends with an “S” you must add only an apostrophe. You look like a damn fool if you do it wrong.
I will be the first to admit that I am not perfect, I too make grammatical errors. My most common error is comma splicing. I do however know what I am doing wrong and attempt to restructure my sentences accordingly when in a business setting.

I know all of these things, and I did not even listen in school. We need to pay our teachers more. We need to teach things that need to be taught. We need to make it fun.
We certainly have the technology to do so, but no one wants to foot the bill.

My school taught it, I’ll tell ya this, it was a complete and utter waste of time.
3rd grade “Ok we’re going to start to learn cursive handwriting now”
4th grade “EVERYTHING you do must be in cursive.”
5th grade “do whatever the fuck ya want”

The only cursive letters I remember are the ones that appear in my name.

I don’t see cursive as outdated. I use it all the time. Granted, I send email and text messages for most things. However, if I give a subordinate written instructions, they better be able to read them. If they can’t read cursive, then we don’t need them. We’re too busy to baby a few people that haven’t mastered this basic skill. Like I said, I don’t care what form they choose to write their own notes (I may still remember a bit of shorthand), but they better be able to read mine.

I sometimes travel for my job and I don’t always have access to my computer. I need to be able to write or I’m giving up a lot of my communication ability. It’s a skill I’m glad I have. It’s faster than printing. Plus if I write it out there’s a paper trail. That sometimes comes in very handy. Verbal is good, but it leaves no trail.

In high school and college, a lot of my teachers made notes in cursive. I would have been lost if I couldn’t read it. It isn’t outdated when a good portion of the country still uses it on a daily basis. As for spelling and grammar, I completely agree that schools do not spend enough time on these skills. While my grammar isn’t perfect, I often see things that would give my sophomore year English teacher a heart attack. Almost everything I know about sentence structure was learned that year.

@jerv and @uberbatman – great answers

I’m curious – when was the last time anyone here has seen cursive writing? I see it once per year in a card from my grandmother. I’m wondering what other obsolete technologies we should training our kids in hopes that they may have a chance to stumble across it.

How long would it take to teach kids how to read cursive in case they see it somewhere? That doesn’t seem difficult or unreasonable.

@tom_g I’m curious – when was the last time anyone here has seen cursive writing?

Almost daily. My daughter’s teachers use cursive when they write on the papers and daily planner that my daughter brings home.

@tom_g I use it daily (and I’m a programmer). I often have notes that need to be kept. Yes, I keep digital notes too, but they can and have been lost. If someone needs to see my notes, then they have to read my handwriting. My daughter’s teachers write notes on the board in cursive.

@tom_g The most recent example I can think of was when a card was passed around for a new mom at my work. I quickly scanned what had already been written, and one of the notes was in an absolutely beautiful cursive hand. I was transfixed, and just soaked up the grace of it for while. It was written by a thirty-something woman.

My daughter, now 26, is a prolific writer. She’s an incredibly good typist (or is that “keyboarder” now?), but when she writes fiction she insists on writing everything first by hand. There’s something about the physicality of the act, and the material nature of the line on paper that she finds indispensable to her process. She even keeps the exhausted corpses of all of the pens she has spent along the way in a special box, like dear departed companions.

Yes, I think so. Call me old-fashioned, but I think handwriting is useful even in this technological age. I like a handwritten letter, I think handwriting is personal in a way that machine writing is not. If the world gives up handwriting, I give up the world.

@thorninmud , wow, I thought I was the only one who HAS to write to get it right!

My daughter is in jr.high. Her penmanship stinks and she knows it. They don’t use cursive at her school, a public school. It bothers her, so we work on it at home. I told her that during her lifetime cursive would probably be used less and less, until she could use it like a code.

@mowens Why do you think that spelling should be dropped? And then you go on to complain about spelling mistakes.

I think spelling and vocabulary are under-emphasized and, since they are key to communication, need more attention.

The best way to learn proper spelling is by repetitive writing. The physical spelling of the word imprints it on the brain.

I think at minimum they should learn it for a few weeks in 3rd or 4th grade to be able to read things from the past, and notes some of us old people still write in cursive. Also, some formal invitations still use a script font, it shouldn’t look totally foreign to people in my opinion. If the children never get really good at writing in cursive it’s ok with me at this point, even though I find it a shame since it is the fastest way to write for most people (I understand some people never really get the hang if it). I do want them to have some level of proficiency though. Not teaching it at all I disagree with.

I can tell you this, you better be able to read cursive if you work in the medical field, because a lot of doctors have really bad handwriting and they often use script. I realize prescriptions are more and more done on computers, but not all are.

@zenvelo Spell check works and grammar check does not.
I don’t think spelling should be dropped entirely. I just think significantly less time should be spent on it. I had spelling tests all the way up until 6th grade. At 6th grade, we were learning words that no one ever spells on a daily basis.
However, if they made them vocabulary + spelling tests, I would agree to them. They never made us remember what the word meant, just how to spell it. By 6th grade, I believe that is worthless.
My vocabulary tests stopped around third or fourth grade.

True, spell check doesn’t catch all errors. For example, their and there mean different things and both would pass spell check.

Yes. Not everyone will use computers with printers 24/7.

@mowens I hate that rule with making it s’ because I hate ambiguity. It makes me sound like I am speaking incorrect gramatically, so I do add the “iz” sound regardless.
I learned that that extra possessive s is optional at the end of one-syllable s-ending words.
So it’s grammatically correct to say “class’s”. I pronounce it “classiz”. It’s the classiz paper.
I get grammar but it can be annoying sometimes. Fire can be two syllables if I want it to, and w & y are always vowels in my book. But anyways I don’t want to get too off-topic.

Hmm..I had no idea. I seriously never see it except for my annual Christmas card from my grandmother. I only saw it in 4th grade (1980), then not a single person (other than my grandmother) wrote anything to me in cursive. Not one teacher. Not a single one of my kids’ teachers. Nobody. My experience might not be common.

I also seem to be unusual in that I find cursive to be extremely visually disturbing. It creates a very uncomfortable feeling. I just looked it up online and saw samples of cursive writing. I find it to be a very inaccurate and inefficient font that (to me) fails to communicate as beautifully as regular print writing (or typed fonts).

But like I said, there is nothing wrong with spending a day or two learning how to read it.

Another question – for those who really love cursive, what do you think about regular print writing?

@tom_g I don’t see anything wrong with printing. Just seems too labor intensive to produce. I’m lazy and impatient. My daughter prefers printing to cursive. She knows both but likes to print. She makes the cutest little a. It is like the typed version with the curve over the top.

@tups I write hand written thank you notes all of the time. I print them, then sign my name. Handwritten print, not computer print.

Not that we use them too frequently, but the uppercase Qs and Zs that I learned in cursive were also ridiculous. They looked more like the number 2 and the number 3 respectively.

@mowens I like the idea. Although it is still not the same for me. If I receive a print of handwriting, the magic is lost. The magic lies in the fact that I can hold in my hand something someone has written with their own hand.

So they don’t teach it in all schools now? When I was in school they taught us that, in fact, they were really aggressive about it. :/ And it’s one thing I can brag about it, my cursive writing is awesome.
Wasn’t aware that it was no longer taught, or barely. But what is school like now, anyways? Do people still have desks and write on paper, or does everyone have a terminal and everything is on a computer? I seriously don’t know. And do kids do their homework on the computer now? I mean, not every family has one, contrary to popular belief…have schools changed that much?

Although I admit, not having to lug books in your backpack from and to school every damn day would have been nice back in my time…

@Symbeline: “But what is school like now, anyways?”

It is almost exactly as it was when I was in school (I’m 42). They have a small time where they learn cursive in 4th grade, and then it’s back to normal. All work is done in writing – in print characters, not cursive.

@Symbeline: “Do people still have desks and write on paper, or does everyone have a terminal and everything is on a computer?”

My daughter is in 6th grade and just started having to occasionally turn in papers that are typed. Everything else must be written (print, not cursive).

@Symbeline: “And do kids do their homework on the computer now? I mean, not every family has one, contrary to popular belief…have schools changed that much?”

I think every family does have one at this point – unless they had to sell it for food, in which case they have (and we do) a serious problem with poverty. Perfect school computers are between $199 – $249 these days, so it’s not a huge investment.

But no – my daughter only has the occasional paper that needs to be typed, along with some French homework exercises that need to be done online.

Thanks @tom_g for the info.

I think every family does have one at this point – unless they had to sell it for food, in which case they have (and we do) a serious problem with poverty. Perfect school computers are between $199 – $249 these days, so it’s not a huge investment.

If I take what you said and go back in time to when I was in school and living with my dad, 249$ a month was pretty much what he got, being on welfare. If I was a kid today and living in that situation, we never would have had a computer. ;/ (the internet connection also costs money, although that is probably not needed for homework, in fact I know for a fact that teachers completely despise Wikipedia)

I use cursive a lot, but I am admittedly old fashion. How do you sign your name?

@YARNLADY: “How do you sign your name?”

It’s more of a scribble/symbol.

Not to derail, but I am morally opposed to signatures as well. They are essentially useless, and only serve a psychological purpose (like the “close door” buttons on elevators).

@tom_g How would you enforce a contract without a signature?

Not sure. We’re in the process of trying to find an alternative to the password (in computing). It may be that the signature is fine for now in signing contracts. But even signatures are so easily forged, I’m not sure of their utility. And in attempting to do any modern business (or healthcare), it’s frustrating to have jump between decades just to pretend that there is something valuable about taking pen to paper and wasting all of that paper. We need an electronic alternative.

But what I was really referring to was the nonsense that we go though when making our purchases. We sign on those electronic pads whenever we make a purchase with our credit card. The signature is never checked, and the individual working the register is not trained to evaluate signatures anyway. But we all do it. Why?

Do you recall back around 2006 or 2007 when many retailers started skipping the signature requirement for purchases under x dollars? For example, Whole Foods doesn’t require a signature for purchases < $50. But what purpose does the chicken scratch serve? If you claim a fraudulent purchase to your credit card company, they don’t require or check on the signature. There would be nothing gained from that anyway. Signing those ridiculous pads is a placebo, like the elevator “close doors” button.

Darn it, I derailed. Sorry.

I color the automated boxes in, or sign my name as a random historical figure.

Both make the transaction go through.

I’m a homeschooling parent.

I, personally, am obsessed with the written word, and do calligraphy. I change my handwriting twice a day, haha.

My son couldn’t be arsed. I don’t intend to force him to write in miniscule, if all caps is legible enough. Cursive is extracurricular, as long as he can figure out how to read it.

I can’t read the declaration of independence and notes from my mother. Fortunately someone has transcribed the Declaration of Independence into text for me. As for my mother’s cursive notes; I am not entirely sure anyone can read that squiggly stuff.

^ I happily provide transcription services for a nominal fee. I can even read my doctor’s handwriting.

@Seek_Kolinahr I could use that, even when my husband writes a note in printing I can’t read it.

Handwriting is still taught in school. My kids all learned cursive and then, like almost every other single person, stopped using it. Even though they all attended the same school, they have varying levels of legibility. My daughter’s writing is very messy and when she was younger she often had her grades marked down for it. One of my sons prides himself on neat writing but the other isn’t so concerned with it. Like adults, they’re all different.

Personally I think handwriting is very individual and unless someone is forced to use a particular type of writing, they will just write their own way if they aren’t writing for an assignment. Even way back when I was a kid and we all supposedly learned all the right things we all had different handwriting preferences.

And it seems like this is another misconception among people who don’t have kids. They don’t learn to write properly, they don’t say the Pledge of Allegiance in school, they get trophies and awards for doing nothing but show up, yada yada yada. In my experience these things are the exception rather than the rule.