Cursive Is Coming Back To Classrooms This Fall After Being Called ‘A Waste Of Time’


Did you ever have to write in cursive when you were in school? If you’re from a younger generation of laptops then you may no even have ever had to write using that elegant swirly script. Back in the day, it was very much a standard practice for teachers to go through it with their students, teaching them the nuances of each letter’s twists and turns. Unfortunately it seemed that those were days of a bygone era as many schools stopped placing an importance on learning cursive.

However there is one school down in Texas that is determined to bring the art of cursive. Back in 2017, the State Board of Education made the motion to bring back cursive in Texas schools, however the implementation will finally begin in the 2019-2020 school year.

This means students in the upcoming year, specifically second grade students, can look forward to learning the traditional penmanship style as part of the new updates to the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS).

It also means that by the time these students get to the third grade level, they will be expected to “write complete words, thoughts, and answers legibly in cursive writing leaving appropriate spaces between words.” And by the time they leave the fourth grade, students will be expected to show proficiency in cursive.

But this new change may also have some benefits, as explained by Suzanne Baruch Asheron, who works as an occupational therapist with the Beverly Hills Unified School District in California and is a national presenter for Handwriting Without Tears, an early childhood education company. “Cursive handwriting stimulates brain synapses and synchronicity between the left and right hemispheres, something absent from printing and typing. As a result, the physical act of writing in cursive leads to increased comprehension and participation.”

In fact, the College Board has even found that students who wrote in cursive for the essay portion of the SATs would actually score higher than the students who didn’t.

The theory behind this is that the cursive writing is more speedy and efficient than writing in block lettering, thus allowing the writer to focus more on the content than the speed. This is why experts feel that the speed and efficiency of cursive allows the students to focus more on the content of their essays, rather than getting their essays completed within the time limit. Pretty interesting, right?

What do you think of the changes being implemented in the Texas schools?


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