The Lost Art - Lena Rivkin

I am staggered by the trend of eliminating cursive writing as a required course in our nation's public schools.  We should be teaching our children more not less. While much has been rightly and passionately written above regarding the statistics and science of what cursive writing contributes to educating a well rounded adult, I feel compelled to contribute from my own perspective. 

If we care more about short cuts than teaching cursive writing, the loss of individual intimacy in regards to letter writing will be profound. Cursive writing involves the integration of the body, both hemispheres of the brain as well as building the connective tissue between the letter writer and the letter reader. Because we know there are serious drawbacks in brain development that can occur when cursive writing is not implemented, it's horrifying to imagine schools no longer willing to improve young minds in their foolhardy pursuit of ways to 'shortcut' education. How can a country fully and competitively educate a child without educating all of the child?

To me, the severity of the loss is the loss of human contact--contact of the hand to the pen, and the pen to the paper. Simply printing letters does not promote the art of writing in the way that cursive writing not only connects each letter to each other, but also serves to connect the emotional thoughts the writer is attempting to convey. 

As I am an artist as well as a graphologist, I always make personal cards for friends and family. The act of making the card and cursively writing a personal message to each person connects me to them, and them to me in a way that transcends what an email or text or store bought greeting card can do. While the immediacy of a text or instant message is tantalizing in the time that it saves, why is it that no one seems to have any extra time?  

The instant gratification of messaging from PDA to smartphone is not a technological advance I can personally retreat from. I compensate for that convenience by reaching out to those near and dear to me via pen, paper, ink and the connecting script of the D'Nealian method that I loved learning back in the third grade of my public school in Studio City, California. When you write in cursive, you cannot multitask. The mere act of cursive writing forces you to be in the moment with your thoughts... and imagine what a different world this would be if we communicated with thought and intent, as opposed to shortcuts and abbreviations.

To write and/or receive a hand-written letter is a gift in itself. To eliminate cursive writing as an educational tool that has merely fallen by the wayside is a complete disgrace--as it only furthers the divide of detachment from human to human. Short cuts in education never serve the student, only the administration looking to save money. If we truly are to remain a global leader in education, creativity and innovation, we must fully contribute to the complete and integrated growth of our children, which includes lost languages, lost art and hopefully not the art of cursive writing.

Can we learn from Mexico? - Edda Manley

We can have 101 reasons why we need to write in cursive, but until we find some that connect with parents, teachers, and students on an emotional level, change won’t happen. 

1) Children who are able to learn to write in the USA (same goes for Canada) are those where the parents have enough money to send the children to private schools or tutors.  I fear this will ultimately lead to a “class” system. Ironically, I don’t think most teachers have salaries high enough to send their children to private schools. Something for teachers to think long and hard about.

2) Most Latin-based language countries (all of South America and Central America and others around the world) value cursive writing or “caligrafia” as they call it and make sure their children are able to write fluently. This will, in the future, put North American children at a disadvantage from a global perspective.

We have so much valid information about the Importance of Handwriting, yet we stay on the wrong road instead of getting back onto the right road. 

3) At a 2002 conference that we hosted in Canada, one of our presenters, Inez Emmaus from Mexico, told us that for over 18 years only printing was taught in Mexico because in those days, their President didn't like to write in cursive so he banned it from the schools. Around the year 2000, the education leaders of the country decided that cursive was to be brought back into the curriculum. The first thing they had to do was to send the teachers who could not write in cursive back to school to learn how to write and teach cursive.

Maybe the thought of bringing Mexican people into the USA to teach American children how to write in cursive will inspire the education leaders to look after own. 

Report from the Summit

The Handwriting for the 21st Century Summit was held in Washington DC on January 23rd, 2012. Educators and researchers are concerned that the Common Core Curriculum, which aims towards a National Standards Test in 2014 (more than 40 states have agreed to participate), has left cursive writing out of the curriculum.

Three important points from that summit meeting were:
1) that fMRI research shows that children develop adult-like connections in the brain once they have learned handwriting to the point that it is automated. This cannot be accomplished by reading to children or by keyboarding; you must write by hand to do it
2) During the 1960’s and ‘70’s handwriting and spelling was emphasized and content was considered less important. In the 1980’s and ‘90’s the standard changed to making content the most important, and handwriting and spelling were no longer emphasized.
3) It was agreed that handwriting is one of the foundation skills that must be kept in the curriculum, and lots of work needs to be done to make this happen.

Many of the younger teachers today did not receive enough practice in cursive writing to feel confident to use it never mind teach it. It has always been interesting to me that illiteracy rates have escalated with the de-emphasis on handwriting.

Edda Manley (Canada)