Should Cursive Be Taught in Schools?

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

This year, the state of Ohio will join several others in requiring that elementary school students learn cursive handwriting in addition to simple printing.

And this was met with a lot of applause from some parents and educators.

And others said that it was a terrible idea.

There have been blistering essays online saying that in an age of keyboards and texting, why are we wasting time teaching kids to write cursive?

And the proponents are saying, well, it’s a great discipline for the children.

It helps you understand what you’re writing about.

And I’m kind of on the fence about it.

But people are saying, oh, it’s a lost art.

But I’ve been reading my parents’ love letters.

My parents, my dad died 15 years ago, but he gave me a big stack of the love letters that he and my mother shared.

Oh, wow.

And it’s astonishing.

I find when I read them that the handwriting itself is a kind of voice because the handwriting of my mother sounds like her.

It’s almost like a seventh sense or something.

I have exactly the same feeling.

My father recently died, and we were going through his stuff when I was there with my mother.

And I was surprised how much just seeing his handwriting made me realize that nobody would ever write that way again.

Those letters and that shape and that way with that slant and that type of pressure on the ink and how utterly recognizable it is.

Like his face.

His handwriting is as easy to know as the look on his face.

Right, right.

It’s intimate, and it’s really defining.

I don’t know that the advantages of cursive writing, though, are much beyond hanging on to something that was important.

I don’t know that it’s still important.

I certainly recognize the validity of the debate, and many of the points made in favor of teaching cursive are very solid.

Right.

But I’m not 100% sure that we aren’t just being nostalgic for a different way of communicating that isn’t really important anymore.

Yeah, yeah, that’s the same thing that I’m struggling with.

Is it this dying art form?

You know, people argue, well, you should be able to read the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.

But didn’t we all read that in print rather than in the script?

One of the things that I find when I read these arguments in favor of teaching cursive in schools is that many of them are still true if we simply talk about sending letters.

So a lot of what they’re talking about is a different way of communicating that wasn’t text messages and chat and email.

For example, if you look at the archives of famous people from the 1920s and 1930s and look at their letters,

There is something wonderful about the telegram and the typewritten letter.

And none of it’s handwritten except maybe the signature.

And yet it still feels like an artifact of history because we don’t do that either.

We don’t send typewritten letters to people, to friends and to family and to coworkers and colleagues.

It’s mostly email at this point, right?

Right.

Well, if you’re going to get a sympathy note in the mail, you want that to be in the person’s handwriting, right?

You do.

That’s a kind of voice.

That’s what I keep coming back to.

I had a similar thing about a lost voice.

And when I mentioned my mother earlier, I met my stepmother.

My birth mother died just a couple weeks after my brother and I were born.

And one of my aunts gave me a letter recently, and it was written by my birth mother.

And it was written a couple weeks before my brother and I were born.

In her handwriting, it was a card to another aunt.

And in it, she mentions the babies.

And she mentioned me and my brother before we were born.

It is the first mention of me anywhere on the planet, as far as I know, in print.

And it was in a handwriting that was a stranger to me, and handwriting that I didn’t know.

And so if I couldn’t read that, and it was very clear handwriting, clearly she learned in school.

She had followed her lessons well and written it according to the way that she was taught.

But if I couldn’t have read that, what a loss that would have been.

What a thing would have missed, what a hole I would have.

Right, right.

Well, I know there are a lot of strong arguments on both sides of this question, and we’d love to hear from you about them.

Give us a call if you have thoughts about teaching cursive in schools, 877-929-9673, or email words@waywordradio.org.

Or if you can fit them into Twitter, try hitting us up @wayword.

I had a light bulb moment this week when I realized that the word yen is Chinese rather than Japanese.

I was thinking that if you have a yen for something, it’s like the monetary unit in Japan, but it’s not.

They’re separate words.

Yeah, they’re completely separate words.

The word yen, like a sharp desire or a hunger, comes from an old Chinese word meaning craving.

Okay, and how did it come into English?

Was there a particular connection there?

Yes, the original sense of yin in English was the craving of a drug addict for his drug, originally opium.

Opium, so we’re talking about that particular period in history.

Gotcha.

Yeah, 1876.

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