EDITORIAL: Handwriting is not obsolete

Educators hate it when politicians tell them what to teach. There is usually a good reason for this, as when the state of Florida passed laws restricting what can be taught about race and gender identity, not to improve the performance of schools, but to force a political agenda on them.

There are times, though, when a nudge from the elected representatives of the government bodies that fund public schools can have a positive effect on education.

A law passed last summer by the Wisconsin Legislature requires public schools to use principles of phonics-based instruction in teaching children in 4-year-kindergarten through third grade. Gov. Tony Evers, a former state superintendent of public instruction and an outspoken champion of K-12 schools, praised the law and signed it.

The legislation, which was opposed by the teachers union, the Wisconsin Education Association Council, had bipartisan support as a response to student reading scores that had regressed after phonics-based teaching was largely replaced by alternative methods. A motivating factor was a report that only about one-third of Wisconsin third-graders test proficient in reading.

In October, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a law that requires the teaching of cursive writing in grades 1-6 in his state’s public schools.

The Wisconsin Assembly passed a bill in 2021 that requires public schools to include cursive instruction in their curriculums with the goal of having students being proficient in the writing before sixth grade. A Senate version of the bill has not yet come to a vote.

The bills are weighted by some political baggage. Restoring cursive training is on the to-do list of conservative education reform movements in a number of states, which is a factor in the opposition to the bills by almost all of the Democrats in the Wisconsin Legislature.

It is absurd that efforts to restore the ability to write by hand are political issues. California made it clear that conservatives do not own the cursive writing issue. The legislature that passed the cursive education mandate has large Democratic majorities in each of its two houses. The chief executive who signed it is known as one of the country’s most progressive governors.

Twenty-one states now require cursive teaching. Wisconsin should join them.

Once a universal element of grade-school curriculums everywhere in the U.S., cursive writing instruction was abandoned in many school districts when Common Core state standards were adopted. The result is evident in the number of a young people who are incapable of writing fluently on paper. Even as adults, some don’t know how to properly hold a pencil or pen, gripping the writing implement in their fist when they go through the infrequent but tedious exercise of hand-printing a note, message or receipt in block letters.

Common Core standards require keyboard skills to be taught in grades 3 through 5, and this is certainly necessary. In this advanced age of computer communication, the ability to type fast and accurately is an essential element of literacy. But keyboard skills and handwriting skills are not mutually exclusive.

The ability to communicate is essential to success in any walk of life, and it is diminished by the absence of handwriting skills. Handwriting has practical advantages. It is always there for people who have mastered it as a communication tool when electronic keyboards are not handy or don’t work. As for mastering it, eons of experience show that young children learn it easily and quickly.

Cursive advocates say the disciplines in the process of learning it make for better students. A Florida academic study found that students who were able to write neatly in cursive had better reading and math skills than others.

The ability to write in cursive brings along with it the ability to easily read sentences written in cursive, a skill that has withered apace with the decline in handwriting instruction.

And there is an emotional element. No words created on a computer keyboard can replace the meaning of personal messages written and read in cursive—a Christmas card addressed and signed in handwriting, a thank-you note, a sympathy card, a heartfelt letter.

Those who say technology has rendered handwriting obsolete make the mistake of assuming the marvelous technology we enjoy justifies discarding a skill that has served and improved civilization for centuries. The same argument would justify artificial intelligence replacing human thinking.

Cursive teaching is recommended in education standards set by the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction.

If more school districts followed that advice, the Legislature would probably not be weighing a cursive mandate.