America needs to give up on cursive

Senate Bill 113 was deemed as a “bill to watch” by our very own Indiana Daily Student.
The bill “Requires each school corporation and accredited nonpublic elementary school to include cursive writing in its curriculum” and “requires each school corporation and accredited nonpublic school to include reading in its curriculum.”

I really can’t disagree with mandating reading in the curriculum, but I do struggle with making sure that cursive writing does, in fact, outlive our grandparents.

Cursive writing just doesn’t have much of a place in society anymore. We’re done writing letters and drafting documents to free America from Britain.

Why should we force cursive writing when we could be teaching keyboarding — the alternative many schools are embracing.

A lot of cursive’s support comes from the argument that we need students to be able to read cursive and they obviously cannot read it without learning to first write the fancy script.

The proponents fear that future historians will not be able to accurately study important documents like the Declaration of Independence and Constitution.
But this won’t be the case at all.

Just like any dead language or script, there will be a reserved elite who will rise up, learn the script and continue to study the original documents. It happened with Egyptian hieroglyphics and even Middle English.

We pride ourselves in basing our literary tradition on foundational texts like the Canterbury Tales, but most students could never study that text in its original script.
Documents get passed down, translated and transcribed if they are important. The same thing has happened and will continue to happen with our important American documents.

Other proponents are saying that there are more benefits to cursive writing than simply keeping old documents out of the dark. In 2006, the College Board released a statement about the SAT writing section stating, “15 percent of essays were written in cursive, while the other 85 percent were printed. Essays written in cursive received a slightly higher score.”

The “slightly higher score” they refer to averages out to be around two-tenths of a point. Not anything to write home about.

Others refer to cursive as a nice piece of tradition or a piece of art. They see it as boosting creativity, personal ownership of language and the artistic instinct in children.
If that’s the case, we should just keep arts programs in school.

The fact of the matter is that cursive is on the way out and mandating its presence in schools is a waste of valuable time for many politicians.

I learned cursive and followed in my father’s footsteps of creating some kind of monstrosity that now forces me to write in block letters if I want to be taken semi-seriously.

If they ever need a spokesperson for the lack of cursive’s lasting impact, they can go ahead and call me up.

­— sjostrowski@indiana.edu