The Fight For Cursive (Back In My Day)

New Jersey just joined the company of states requiring cursive to be taught in school. It's a reminder of one of the most powerful forces in education.

The New Jersey act was accompanied by the usual fraught language. Said Governor Murphy:

The return to including cursive instruction is especially meaningful as New Jersey celebrates the upcoming 250th anniversary of our country's founding – giving our students the skills they need to read our nation's founding documents and complete tasks like opening a bank account or signing a check, in addition to offering cognitive benefits.

 Or this from the bill's co-sponsor:

Not only does handwriting instruction encourage better retention and comprehension of information, but it also allows our students to build self-confidence and maintain a vital connection to written communication in the increasingly digital age.

Or State Senator Shirkey Turner, who just has feelings about cursive:

Cursive is a timeless and necessary skill that we must incorporate into our curriculum again

The arguments used in New Jersey are a little thin. Read old documents? As someone who has done historical research for decades, I can tell you that 250-year old cursive doesn't yield readily to modern cursive knowledge. Sign checks? Go find a Millennial and ask them when they last wrote a paper check. Cognitive benefits? Name two-- specifically two that aren't associated with any kind of writing on paper.

You can find websites arguing for a return to cursive. Popular arguments include developing fine motor skills, working with legal documents, helps students with dyslexia, and connects to the past.

This is really weak sauce as educational arguments go, and yet New Jersey brings us up to 25 states that now mandate cursive instruction.

Why? Because one of the most powerful forces in education debates starts with "Well, back in my day..." For many civilians, including legislators, Proper Education is defined roughly as How School Worked When I Was There. This calcified nostalgia sometimes turns up in the assertion that "Schools haven't changed in X number of years" which generally means "I have had no direct contact with a school since I graduated, and I imagine everything is exactly the same." But sometimes this bubbles up in the assertion "Schools need to get back to inflicting on students the same stuff they inflicted on me."

Yes, like other folks of a Certain Age, I remember my cursive instruction in fourth and fifth grade. Miss Eakin handing out the practice books and those pens with the long thin top ends, like a plastic design meant to invoke the profile of a quill pen, the top end often nibbled off by nervous students. "Round, round, ready, write," she would direct and we'd do a couple of circles above the page before dropping down on "write" and making the circles-- "One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight." And on through another batch of shapes. 

I was not particularly great at it. When I took shop class in eighth grade, we were taught the blocky all-caps printing of drafting, and I never went back. Maybe learning that cursive created some sorts of wiring paths in my brain that have helped me since, but I have my doubts, and I am perfectly happy for states that do not mandate cursive instruction for my sons or grandchildren.

I may be an old fart, but I have often rejected this kind of Back In My Day Bait. I taught English for thirty-nine years, and you will not get to argue in favor of sentence diagramming. Nor do I think schools suffer from a lack of Latin instruction. 

Does it hurt someone to learn cursive and Latin and sentence diagramming? Probably not. Don't these subjects have some utility and usefulness? Sure, some, but here's the thing-- every time you put one thing in a classroom, you keep something else out. If you tell me I musty teach Unit X, then be prepared to tell me what unity I should take out, and explain why Unit X has more utility and value than the unit you propose to remove. 

Students in New Jersey are now going to get less of something so that they can spend more time round round ready writing their way to signing checks and reading historical documents. Maybe it is easier to teach children cursive than to teach adults that the world continues to change and some of the stuff that was part of school Back In The Day doesn't need to be there any more.