By Christopher Harper
Pennsylvania—like 28 other states—does not require students to write in cursive lettering.
Fortunately, at least one Pennsylvania politician is mounting a campaign to force students to learn how to write in cursive.
State Rep. Joe Adams, a Republican representing an area near Scranton, thinks it should be mandated and has proposed legislation to do so.
A former school superintendent, Adams said he believes it is important enough to find time to teach it, and he said so do experts in education, neurology, and psychology who offer up brain science and historical reasons to support the idea. He also gave some practical reasons.
“You can’t open a bank account without signing your name. You can’t buy a property or get a credit card without having to be able to sign your name,” Adams said. He added that a person’s signature can be a unique identifier that could be one thing artificial intelligence cannot reproduce.
“All those things pointed me to saying, this makes great sense,” Adams said.
Pennsylvania’s Education Secretary Khalid Mumin doesn’t consider cursive instruction to be vital.
“Secretary Mumin encourages schools to determine the best paths for their students to learn to communicate effectively in writing and achieve success, regardless of the mode of writing used to get there,” Education Department spokesman Taj Magruder Adams told PennLive.com.
Cumberland Valley, located in southern Pennsylvania near the Maryland border, decided to reintroduce cursive writing into the curriculum.
Robyn Euker, Cumberland Valley’s director of curriculum, instruction, and assessment, said the district chose to require cursive instruction after noticing an increasing number of students with poor handwriting in the upper grades.
When the district was looking to adopt a new literacy curriculum, she said, it decided to buy the cursive writing supplement to address the handwriting concern.
Two years later, Euker said the feedback she had received was positive.
“I think it’s a little bit of a creative outlet for students,” she said.
Euker also said it seems beneficial for students with reading and writing issues. Writing in cursive has fewer starts and stops than in print. Words appear as one block instead of a series of separate letters, which can help students with dyslexia.
Given the benefits, including allowing students to read handwritten cards from older relatives, Euker said, “I wouldn’t be surprised if we see more states require it.”
After all, it’s not an instruction that needs to be taught repeatedly. Once students learn it, the neuropathways allow them to associate a manuscript letter with how it looks in cursive and understand what is written, said Lynn Baynum, chair of Shippensburg University’s Teacher Education Department.
“When we first began teaching cursive a hundred years ago, we didn’t understand it was a pattern of associations we were doing to create a literate society,” Baynum said. “It’s also why keyboarding is important to teach, too, because we don’t want students slowing down their ability to communicate because they have to find a letter on the keyboard.”
Teaching cursive is a no-brainer to me.
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