Screens glow in nearly every classroom across the country. Keyboards click where pencils once scratched. And for millions of students, the looping letters of cursive handwriting have become as foreign as a dead language.
Ever since cursive was removed as a requirement in the Common Core Standards in 2010, instruction in cursive has quietly disappeared from public school curricula across the country. A 2016 survey by the American Association of School Administrators found that fewer than half of public elementary schools still taught the skill, a steep drop from decades prior.
As laptops and tablets replace notebooks, educators and researchers are asking a harder question: what exactly is lost when students stop writing by hand?
“The ability to go from print to cursive indicated that you were in second or third grade and that you got to learn the adult way of writing,” Dr. GayMarie Vaughan, Victor F. White Master Teaching Chair in English, said.
In the school’s curriculum, however, cursive remains a central part of lower school Language Arts classes. By opting to continue the craft, students gain a neurological and literary foundation that screens cannot replicate — but perhaps at the cost of the typing speed and digital fluency that an increasingly keyboard-driven world demands early.
“Cursive has been taught at (the school) since the beginning, and I’ve been here 17 years,” Second-grade instructor Susan Morris said. “It’s been around the entire time.”
For Morris, who teaches cursive to the boys, the process begins in January of second grade, when students transition from D’Nealian print — a style that uses slight curves to ease the shift — into full cursive. From that point on, everything is written in cursive.
“It’s a struggle,” Morris said, “but once they do it, it takes about a full month before they feel comfortable with it.”
Morris and Vaughan argue that the struggle is precisely the point.
Research increasingly supports what many educators have long suspected: writing by hand does something to the brain that typing simply cannot replicate. Cursive, in particular, engages both the left and right hemispheres simultaneously, building neural pathways that print and keyboard input do not. Studies have linked handwriting to stronger memory retention, improved eye-hand coordination and measurable benefits for students with learning differences such as dyslexia and dysgraphia.
“Handwriting really improves coordination,” Morris said. “You retain things more if you handwrite them than if you type them on a computer, by far.”
Vaughan points to the “kinesthetic” dimension of the skill — the physical, muscle-memory quality of forming letters by hand — as something irreplaceable.
“It gets cemented in a kinesthetic way,” Vaughan said. “I know there’s magic in the kinesthetic because I remember back in the day, my own kid struggled when he was learning how to write — ‘Ps’ would go backwards or ‘Ss’ would go backwards.”
That struggle, she said, is developmental. The resistance of the pencil against paper and the deliberate tracing of connected letters forces the brain to process language differently than it does when fingers tap keys.
“I like the idea of hand to paper,” Vaughan said. “I think you remember things when you write them in a different way than you do when you type them out.”
Morris echoed the point through the lens of the classroom. She argues that students who write in cursive, begin to see words as unified shapes rather than collections of individual letters: a shift that reinforces spelling, comprehension and retention, all at once.
In fact, the benefits of cursive education extend beyond the classroom. This year, Morris’s second graders studied famous texts from hundreds of years ago — many of which were written in cursive — and were actually able to read and understand them.
“(Students) feel very grown up (reading cursive) because they can read documents,” Morris said. “This year, for example, we studied the Declaration of Independence, and they couldn’t have read that if they hadn’t learned cursive.”
Vaughan raises a similar point about cultural literacy and access to the past.
“Being able to read letters from times gone by that people wrote in cursive — it would be good to know how to do that,” Vaughan said.
However, as cursive continues to fade nationally, some worry the skill will become a marker of privilege, offered in private schools and wealthy districts while disappearing from underfunded public classrooms.
“We certainly don’t want to have it turn into a privilege thing,” Vaughan said. “Particularly if it’s something that helps brain development, it doesn’t need to be kept for just a few.”
Morris offers a starker warning about the window for learning the skill. Cursive is not a subject that can simply be added to a curriculum later; it must be taught to young students while the brain is still forming the fine motor and cognitive connections the skill depends on.
“Once you miss the window to teach cursive, you pretty much miss it; you’ll never learn it again,” Morris said. “We feel like it’s important because cursive enforces learning. The boys see words instead of just letters, and it sticks in their heads better.”
One major caveat in the entire “cursive vs. typing” debate that Vaughan stresses is that none of this requires abandoning one or the other. The debate, simply put, is a false one.
“Learning cursive doesn’t mean you’re not going to be digitally literate,” Vaughan said. “I definitely think we need to learn keyboarding, because I’ve had students who didn’t know how to type fast.”
The goal is not to choose between the loop of a cursive letter and the click of a key. It is to recognize that both serve the developing mind, and that surrendering one in favor of the other may cost more than it saves.
“I don’t think it’s a trade-off,” Vaughan said. “I think it could be a both-and situation.”
