Missouri hasn’t required kids to learn cursive since 1996, and some schools have stopped teaching it. Here’s what might be lost.
• Cursive’s tougher to forge than block letters or a barely formed squiggle.
• It develops hand-eye and fine-motor coordination.
• It can be beautiful.
• It connects our brain to our body, abstract ideas to sensory experience.
• Handwriting provides a sense of thoughts flowing, not punching out staccato.
• Handwriting helps you remember.
• Cursive is faster than printing, but requires more reflection than keying.
• Love letters just aren’t the same when they’ve been digitized.
• Knowing cursive opens centuries of historic documents to us.
• Handwritten documents endure and become cultural artifacts; electronic records may not.
• New technology uses pens to write into devices, so cursive could make a comeback.
• And as commenter Don Anderson noted in an online TED discussion, “Being that computers have a hard time reading cursive, maybe it w0uid be best lf we hu-mans malntaln a c0mmunlcatlon sy st em th-ey can t re~ad. ;)”
