(The Lion) — How can we help the next generation become better voters, boost physiological development, and increase their memory and executive functioning skills?
Teach them cursive, argues one Pennsylvania lawmaker.
“There are compelling cognitive, developmental, and practical reasons for ensuring students have at least a basic grasp of cursive writing,” wrote Republican State Rep. Dane Watro in a sponsorship memorandum.
“Teaching this foundational and functionally relevant skill better equips students for academic and professional endeavors.”
Watro introduced House Bill 17 on Jan. 8, adding cursive to the list of required subjects for public and private elementary schools, according to Gannett’s GoErie.com.
‘Reading cursive is a superpower’
The news comes even as the National Archives has called for volunteers to help them review more than 300 million digital items, many of which are handwritten in cursive.
“Reading cursive is a superpower,” explained community manager Suzanne Isaacs from the National Archives Catalog in Washington, D.C.
“We create missions where we ask volunteers to help us transcribe or tag records in our catalog.”
However, Americans have increasingly lost touch with this form of writing, once taught in public schools and graded as penmanship.
As previously reported by The Lion, many states focused more on typing than handwriting after Common Core standards were released in 2010.
Many educators bemoaned this change, including Jaime Cantrell, professor of English at Texas A&M University-Texarkana.
“Cursive was a coming-of-age part of literacy in the 1980s,” she said. “We learned cursive, and then we could write like adults wrote.”
Cantrell blames talk-to-text technology and artificial intelligence for causing her students to stop typing altogether: “I know that because there’s no punctuation. It reads like a stream of consciousness.”
Now at least 24 states – from Alabama to West Virginia – have passed laws pushing cursive back to prominence, Watro concluded in his memorandum.
“Research shows that learning cursive activates areas of the brain involved in executive function, fine motor skills, and working memory.”
Beyond improved language fluency and enhanced creativity, handwriting also provides important civic benefits, according to Watro.
“Recently, Nevada’s Secretary of State attributed its higher numbers of problematic mail ballots to young voters without developed signatures due to diminishing handwriting instruction.”
Americans could also benefit from the ability to read “key historical sources” such as the U.S. Constitution, Bill of Rights, and Declaration of Independence – all written in cursive, Watro explained.
“Mandating cursive writing education will allow students to actively read seminal documents that shaped our democracy, which is vital for an informed, engaged citizenry in the generations to come.”
