Cursive writing seemed to go the way of quills and parchment. Now the loop de loops and curlicues are coming back
Way back in 2006, Ontario dropped cursive writing from its elementary school curriculum. “Good riddance,” you might’ve thought. Indeed, with personal computers on the rise, curriculum designers figured kids would be better off learning keyboard skills than a mostly out-of-use handwriting script.
And for the better part of two decades, it didn’t seem like anyone really noticed its absence.
But cursive has started mounting a comeback of late, and last month Ontario’s education minister, Stephen Lecce, announced that starting this fall Ontario students will learn how to write in longhand beginning in grade 3 — much to the delight of many parents who felt their children should at least know how to sign their names.
“The research has been very clear that cursive writing is a critical life skill in helping young people to express more substantively, to think more critically and ultimately, to express more authentically,” he told the CBC. Several U.S. states have also introduced bills that would reinstate cursive writing instruction in schools.
It’s more than just a conservative yearning for traditions, too. Experts say that learning cursive writing is especially valuable for younger students. “There’s a myth that in the era of computers we don’t need handwriting. That’s not what our research is showing,” University of Washington professor Virginia Berninger told the Washington Post. “What we found was that children until about grade six were writing more words, writing faster and expressing more ideas if they could use handwriting ― printing or cursive ― than if they used the keyboard.”
So, cursive will be back on the agenda come September in Ontario schools, even if some teachers are unhappy about it. (Their complaints are mainly about the end-of-the-school-year timing of the announcement, leaving limited time to develop new lesson plans and perhaps a little miffed about having to spend a bit of their summer re-learning cursive themselves.) But education experts say the move is a smart one, even if it ruffles a few feathers.
“For note taking, for being literate, for engaging with the demands of school and civil society, your hands matter and you need to be able to write,” said University of Calgary professor emeritus Hetty Roessingh. “The computer will not take that over.”
Content written by Kieran Delamont for Worklife, a partnership between Ahria Consulting and London Inc. To view this content in newsletter form, click here.