The Future of Cursive Writing is Cursed

Excuse me while my recovering-Catholic school girl heart is completely nun-triggered about the fact that cursive handwriting is near oblivion. I got a calligraphy kit for Christmas when I was about 12, and have been writing with old-school pen and ink ever since. I’m forever complaining about my inability to find the correct calligraphy pens, like what happened to the Sharpie calligraphy pens I used to buy at Staples just because I was probably the only one buying them.

In raising my four now-grown kids, cursive handwriting was still taught in schools for most of them but for my youngest son (now 19), it was eliminated and I was horrified. Even though I wasn’t a mother with any interest in home-schooling, I was willing to make an exception. Christian nationalist moms might teach their kids there’s no such thing as Darwin and evolution in their homes? At my house, you’ll learn to sign your name and how to read and write the alphabet in cursive.

I embarked on a token-economy/bribery system of reward. My son liked these like sports mini-figures that came in baseball and football players, so I procured a bunch and they sat in a basket. I bought a cursive handwriting book, and every time he completed a letter of the alphabet, he received one.

I saw a Baltimore Banner headline recently that here in Maryland, Washington College was changing their logo because it included the handwritten signature of the founder of the college, George Washington, which was apparently too difficult to read for cursive-illiterate potential students. The story went a little viral, and was covered by Stephen Colbert, who said, “If only there was some sort of institution of learning that could help people understand words!”

Washington College, which issues the largest undergraduate literary writing prize in the United States at over $65,000 a year, responded to the backlash a bit defensively:

“Brands large and small, some with historic legacies, have been moving away from using cursive and script in their logos and branding for some time now. Last year, Eddie Bauer shed their 59-year-old script logo, commenting in an article on Fast Company that one of the reasons for the change was ‘kids don’t even learn to read cursive in school anymore.’”

Sure, Washington College. Using Eddie Bauer as a reason to defend the removal of the signature of first president of the United States from the university he founded seems legit. It’s sort of like when a teenager gets caught smoking and says, “Well Jimmy was doing it!” Then the college tried arguing that admissions are up because they changed the logo. Apparently all the reading-challenged children now understood where they were applying.

To be fair, this irritates me because my alma mater Western Maryland College, named historically after the railroad, changed its name to McDaniel (highest donor contest annoyingly, and the college had the audacity to ask alum if we wanted a new diploma) because it was allegedly confusing to students that the college wasn’t in a more westernly location in Maryland than Westminster. Like kids were driving around in Frostburg lost? Still not as egregious as taking the George Washington out of Washington College.

Twenty-three U.S. states are now mandating that cursive be taught in schools, and the debate is simmering in school districts across the nation. School curricula is overwhelming already, school budgets and personnel are strained. I volunteered to teach it at my local schools, they’d just have to come up with the basket of prizes for the kids for after they learn each letter. You know, so they can sign their own marriage certificates someday or read an old letter.