Did you know grandmas can’t print? Did you know you can only read the Declaration of Independence in the original historical version? Yeah, neither did I.

I don’t give much of a damn whether or not schools teach cursive. If it’s a choice between cursive or recess time, I say go with recess. If it’s cursive or a has-nothing-to-do-with-teaching-to-the-test project, I say go with the project. But if there’s time enough and it doesn’t cut out anything valuable, sure, why not? Teach cursive if you want.

But I hate ridiculous, sounds-like-common-sense con jobs trying to justify anything, teaching cursive or otherwise. That’s what this post is about.

I read an article about the revival of cursive in the classroom. Arizona is now requiring cursive instruction, which is part of a national movement, so it’s news. I’ve heard arguments that cursive instruction encourages some kind of higher level thinking, but so do any number of other educational activities, so that’s a silly argument. But not as silly, as ridiculous, as logic-challenged, as maddening, as the arguments in this article.

One cursive proponent says, if children know cursive, they can read a letter from grandma. Sounds logical, right? Grandma sends a birthday card or a postcard from Italy, and the poor little grandchild looks at it, turns to mommy in tears and says, “I (choke) can’t read what grandma wrote (sob).” My question is, how stupid is grandma—or grandpa, to make this less sexist (though the article doesn’t mention him)? Didn’t everyone in that generation learn to print? That’s what I do when I send birthday cards or any other written communication to my grand children. I print, so they can read it. For the younger one, I write in all caps, since that’s all she writes and reads at this point. That’s being, I don’t know, thoughtful. Considerate. Loving. My cursive is such a miserable scrawl even I have trouble reading it sometimes, so if I wrote cursive, I’d have to slow down anyway to make it legible. It would take as much effort as simply printing, so they can read it.

But if you don’t think about it, you might say, yeah, that makes sense, let’s teach kids cursive so they can read grandma’s letters.

It the grandma ploy is bad, the Declaration of Independence argument is even worse, which says kids who don’t know cursive will never be able to read historical documents. Using that razor sharp logic, a New York Republican councilman said, “If an American student cannot read the Declaration of Independence, that is sad.”

OK everyone, raise your hands if you’ve ever tried to read the original written version of the Declaration of Independence. Not just peeked at it, not just struggled through the first few sentences, but actually read the original version for content. Don’t be ashamed if you haven’t. I haven’t either. Why bother when I can read a nice, clean, clearly printed version without having to struggle through the writer’s penmanship? Aren’t movable-type printing presses and computers wonderful?

Again, I don’t give a damn about the cursive-no-cursive topic. We have far more important educational issues to deal with. But this is the kind of stuff I hear from politicians all the time: simple, folksy arguments that sound like they make sense until you spend ten seconds thinking about them. “Yeah, that makes sense,” people think when they imagine cursive-deprived children who can’t read grandma’s letter or the Declaration of Independence. Except no, it doesn’t make sense. At best it’s sloppy thinking. At worst, which is more often the case, it’s a purposeful distraction from the real argument. It’s someone smiling and patting you on the back while he’s picking your pocket.

This article appears in Mar 2-8, 2017.

16 replies on “Grandmas, the Declaration of Independence and Cursive”

  1. Sorry David but those things you think are far more important are really political issues that you try to disguise as basic education. Look what happened when we stopped teaching kids how to make change and balance a checkbook. (The joke is that those kids are now in Congress.)

    Go buy a hamburger with cash and watch the college graduate try to make change for a $20. They give you what the register, digital readout says to give you.

    What does the math illiterate have to build on? Self esteem?

  2. Far more important educational issues to deal with? You mean making sure our students come out of school as well-indoctrinated progressives?

  3. They don’t need to read and write. The goal is to create social justice warriors that will shout down and burn down opposing opinions.

    Looks like it’s working just fine David.

  4. “Simple, folksy arguments that sound like they make sense until you spend 10 seconds thinking about them […] At best […] sloppy thinking. At worst […] a purposeful distraction from the real argument.”

    Gosh, David, that’s a pretty good description of what your blog has been for the past 4 years, especially when you write on the subject of TUSD.

    “TUSD is a rusty old ship, but finally, under the leadership of a new captain, heading in the right direction.”

    Yeah right. Looks like the Titanic, which was conspicuoisly NOT heading in the right direction, just hit a very large iceberg which we might dub “public recognition of malfeasance.”

    Will the ship sink? It remains to be seen. Some are bailing water and patching holes as quickly as they can. Others are occupying themselves with slinging mud at the water bailing and hole patching crew.

    I’ll leave it to you to interpret that allegory.

  5. Safier it doesnt surprise me you think the ability to write in cursive is not a problem.

    Kids SHOULD be able to write in cursive legibly, printing is for fine for a first grader … but not for older kids.

    Just as balancing a checkbook is important, or giving a cashier correct change — its all part and parcel of being an educated adult.

  7. As a rule, I try to avoid ad hominem comments, but in this case the author is an idiot.

    A little research would have revealed that there are many things that used to be taught in schools that are now being shown to improve the cognitive abilities of young minds — and older minds as well — such as teaching art, music and yes cursive writing. These things help the mind to make connections between areas of the brain that improve overall performance and thought processes.

    However, go ahead and disparage them Mr. Safier, I look forward to how you will practice your trade when your young audience can only communicate by emoji or texting abbreviations, acronyms and initialisms. ROTFLMFAO.

  9. True story:
    The cursive articles referred to here are press releases directly linked to legislation, known in some states as the “Back to Basics Bill.” The cursive bill was created by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), and it was handed to many of your AZ state legislators when they attended one of ALEC’s posh annual ‘education’ meetings. The bill is literally ready-made – no constituent input needed! – and can be introduced with just a few changes to the heading (ALEC heading to NC, OH, AZ, etc. ).

    WHY a cursive bill? That’s the important question here. The press selling points are the exact same in every state where I’ve seen this come up (“Kids can’t read the Declaration of Independence” is the #1 talking point, by the way). Again, it’s not an organic movement – a national legislative group is driving the conversation and providing press materials.

    The why in this story has nothing to do with founding documents or ‘values’: Back when this bill first made the rounds (2014), it was revealed that Zaner-Bloser pushed for the legislation to be included in the ALEC package. Who is Zaner-Bloser? The company that produces cursive handwriting workbooks…and, not coincidently, the same company who is benefiting from new, mandatory workbook sales to teach cursive in states like Alabama, etc. who pass the cursive law.

  10. What the financial interests are behind any proposed policy, piece of legislation, governance decision, or statement in support of a public administrator should always be revealed in discussions of the pros and cons of what is being proposed or supported.

    Any comments, Parent X, on the financial interests and loyalties behind recent commentary in the Calls to the Audience at February’s TUSD Board meetings? Or are you one of those who always outs ALEC-affiliated interests, and never interests on the other side of the aisle? Or perhaps you are too busy paying attention to what’s going on in Phoenix and Alabama to bother yourself with noticing local interests and local misdeeds… or, then again, perhaps you are silent about them because you benefit from them. If the local interests and motivations are not revealed together with the state level and national level interests, there’s no telling which commenters might in reality be part of the problem on the local level they give the impression they are trying to solve on the state and national level.

  11. Some dig up dirt on ALEC, Yarbrough, Zaner-Bloser, etc. and expose the “sloppy thinking” behind advocacy for handwriting in schools and the “self-interest” behind school voucher programs. On the other side of the aisle, we have bloggers in Tucson working the same vein Safier and his friends do, but with a different cast of characters. Here’s an example of the kind of “research” one of them was doing during the run-up to the 2014 TUSD Board election:

    http://threesonorans.com/2014/09/29/jen-darland-consultant-tusd/

    I have no idea if there is any validity to it. One of its predictions, that Darland would beat Grijalva, certainly did not pan out. The author of the piece does not seem to have done public records requests that prove that there was any verifiable relationship between the former Board candidate and TUSD contracts, and in the absence of that it remains the same sort of flimsy BS Safier pulled out of his bag of tricks when he wrote, in the run-up to the 2016 Board election, about Jim and Kathy Campbell: pure speculation about a possible future financial benefit that MIGHT be motivating current political activities.

    Some of the commenters on TW’s articles about February’s TUSD Board meetings had done a little bit of that sort of research, revealing that one person who spoke in support of Sanchez was on Congressman Grijalva’s staff, others were affiliated with Kristel Foster’s Board campaign, and others were the figureheads who in 2015 had come down to district headquarters to receive Sanchez’s $10K PERSONAL (?!) donation to UHS. More of that research needs to be done and all of it — Yarbrough, ALEC, Zaner-Bloser, solar energy consultants and contractors, Tucson Chamber reps, Grijalva staff members, people who receive PERSONAL donations in support of individual schools from the Superintendent of a public school district — needs to be laid bare so that the electorate can make the right decisions when they vote. As Parent X wrote in another blog’s comment stream: “I wish voters would dig in next time there is a school board election.”

    I wish that too, but I would add that the electorate needs to be digging on BOTH sides of the garden.

    I sometimes wonder if, once it was ALL on the table open to public inspection, the belief could survive that when it comes to promoting policies, framing legislation, and seeking public office, there is any honest, true motivation to serve the public or students in our schools. If our belief in good motivations did survive, perhaps what we would see once everything was on the table is that is resides most often in policy sponsors and candidates who have relatively modest financial backing and few establishment connections and who never manage to get their policies implemented or themselves into public office.

  13. Sorry, but this Grandma learned how to print & write in cursive in 3rd grade. And yes, I did read parts of the Bill of Rights in cursive; a traveling display of “original copies” that were on display in the Capitol of Utah (in Salt Lake City) in 2002. What I find really annoying in your commentary is your apparent blind faith in the fact that all published documents will perennially be available if you just put your hands on a keyboard. Some people have books, documents, diaries, personal letters written in cursive; on paper & much needed &/or necessary. Wouldn’t it be funny, in a future world, that we “grannies” were able to have a “secret language” and would be massively recruited to decode old documents, just because we could read cursive??

  14. Handwriting matters but does cursive matter? The research is surprising. For instance, it has been documented that legible cursive writing averages no faster than printed handwriting of equal or greater legibility. (Sources for all research are listed below.)

    More recently, it has also been documented that cursive does NOT objectively improve the reading, spelling, or language of students who have dyslexia/dysgraphia.
    This is what I’d expect from my own experience, by the way. As a handwriting teacher and remediator, I see numerous children, teens, and adults dyslexic and otherwise for whom cursive poses even more difficulties than print-writing. (Contrary to myth, reversals in cursive are common a frequent cursive reversal in my caseload, among dyslexics and others, is J/f.)
    Other issues with cursive, for many students whose visual and/or motor talents are less than average, include the difficulty that is accidentally created by assuming that all letters can start in the baseline all the time (since this doesn’t work for any letter that follows a cursive b, o, v, or w).

    According to comparative studies of handwriting speed and legibility in different forms of writing, the fastest, clearest handwriters avoid cursive although they are not absolute print-writers either. The highest speed and highest legibility in handwriting are attained by those who join only some letters, not all: joining only the most easily joined letter-combinations, leaving the rest unjoined, and using print-like shapes for letters whose printed and cursive shapes disagree.
    (Other problems with cursive include the fact that starting every letter on the baseline forces cursive letters to change their shape and starting point whenever they follow a cursive letter b or o or v or w.)

    Reading cursive still matters but reading cursive is much easier and quicker to master than writing the same way too.

    Reading cursive, simply reading it, can be taught in just 30 to 60 minutes even to five- or six-year-olds (including those with dyslexia) once they read ordinary print. (All that’s required is to show them, step by step, how the letter-shapes they already know gradually became the fancier ones that they sometimes see.)

    Given the importance of reading cursive, why not simply teach this vital skill once children can read print instead of leaving it to depend upon wherher a child can “pick it up” by learning to write in cursive too?

    We dont require our children to learn to make their own pencils (or build their own printing presses) before we teach them how to read and write. Why require them to write cursive before we teach them how to read it? Why not simply teach children to read cursive along with teaching other vital skills, such as a form of handwriting that is actually typical of effective handwriters?
    Just as each and every child deserves to be able to read all kinds of everyday handwriting (including cursive), each and every one of our children dyslexic or not deserves to learn the most effective and powerful strategies for high-speed high-legibility handwriting performance.
    Teaching material for practical handwriting abounds especially in the UK and Europe, where such handwriting is taught at least as often as the accident-prone cursive which is venerated by too many North American educators. Some examples, in several cases with student work also shown: graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2009/09/08/op…, briem.net, italic-handwriting.org, studioarts.net/calligraphy/italic/hwlesson…, BFHhandwriting.com, handwritingsuccess.com, Lexercise.com, HandwritingThatWorks.com, freehandwriting.net/educational.html )

    Even in the USA and Canada, educated adults increasingly quit cursive. In 2012, handwriting teachers across North America were surveyed at a conference hosted by Zaner-Bloser, a publisher of cursive textbooks. Only 37% wrote in cursive; another 8% printed. The majority 55% wrote with some elements resembling print-writing, others resembling cursive.
    (If you would like to take part in another, ongoing poll of handwriting forms not hosted by a publisher, and not restricted to teachers visit http://www.poll.fm/4zac4 for the One-Question Handwriting Survey, created by this author. As with the Zaner-Bloser teacher survey, so far the results show very few purely cursive handwriters and even fewer purely printed writers. Most handwriting in the real world 75% of the response totals, so far consists of print-like letters with occasional joins.)
    When even most handwriting teachers do not themselves use cursive, why glorify it?

    Believe it or not, some of the adults who themselves write in an occasionally joined but otherwise print-like handwriting tell me that they are teachers who still insist that their students must write in cursive, and/or who still teach their students that all adults habitually and normally write in cursive and always will. (Given the facts on our handwriting today, this is a little like teaching kids that our current president is Richard Nixon.)

    What, I wonder, are the educational and psychological effects of teaching, or trying to teach, something that the students can probably see for themselves is no longer a fact?
    Cursive’s cheerleaders (with whom Ive had some stormy debates) sometimes allege that cursive has benefits which justify absolutely anything said or done to promote that form of handwriting. The cheerleaders for cursive repeatedly state (sometimes in sworn testimony before school boards and state legislatures) that cursive cures dyslexia or prevents it, that it makes you pleasant and graceful and intelligent, that it adds brain cells, that it instills proper etiquette and patriotism, or that it confers numerous other blessings which are no more prevalent among cursive users than among the rest of the human race. Some claim research support citing studies that invariably prove to have been misquoted or otherwise misrepresented by the claimant.

    So far, whenever a devotee of cursive claims the support of research, one or more of the following things has become evident as soon as others examined the claimed support:

    /1/ either the claim provides no source (and no source is provided on request)

    or, almost as often,

    /2/ when sources are cited and can be checked (by finding and reading the cited document), the sources provided turn out to include and/or to reference materials which are misquoted or incorrectly represented by the person(s) offering these as support for cursive,

    or, even more often,

    /3/ the claimant correctly quotes/cites a source which itself indulges in either /1/ or /2/.

    Cursive devotees’ eagerness to misrepresent research has substantial consequences, as the misrepresentations are commonly made under oath in testimony before school districts, state legislatures, and other bodies voting on educational measures. The proposals for cursive are, without exception so far, introduced by legislators or other spokespersons whose misrepresentations (in their own testimony) are later revealed although investigative reporting of the questionable testimony does not always prevent the bill from passing into law, even when the discoveries include signs of undue influence on the legislators promoting the cursive bill? (Documentation on request: I am willing to be interviewed by anyone who is interested in bringing this serious issue inescapably before the publics eyes and ears.)
    By now, youre probably wondering: What about cursive and signatures? Will we still have legally valid signatures if we stop signing our names in cursive? Brace yourself: in state and federal law, cursive signatures have no special legal validity over any other kind. (Hard to believe? Ask any attorney!)
    Questioned document examiners (these are specialists in the identification of signatures, the verification of documents, etc.) inform me that the least forgeable signatures are the plainest. Most cursive signatures are loose scrawls: the rest, if they follow the rules of cursive at all, are fairly complicated: these make a forger’s life easy.

    All handwriting, not just cursive, is individual just as all handwriting involves fine motor skills. That is why any first-grade teacher can immediately identify (from the print-writing on unsigned work) which of 25 or 30 students produced it.

    Mandating cursive to preserve handwriting resembles mandating stovepipe hats and crinolines to preserve the art of tailoring.

    SOURCES:

    Handwriting research on speed and legibility:

    /1/ Arthur Dale Jackson. A Comparison of Speed and Legibility of Manuscript and Cursive Handwriting of Intermediate Grade Pupils.
    Ed. D. Dissertation, University of Arizona, 1970: on-line at http://www.eric.ed.gov/?id=ED056015

    /2/ Steve Graham, Virginia Berninger, and Naomi Weintraub. The Relation between Handwriting Style and Speed and Legibility. JOURNAL OF EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH, Vol. 91, No. 5 (May – June, 1998), pp. 290-296: on-line at http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/275421…

    /3/ Steve Graham, Virginia Berninger, Naomi Weintraub, and William Schafer. Development of Handwriting Speed and Legibility in Grades 1-9.
    JOURNAL OF EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH, Vol. 92, No. 1 (September – October, 1998), pp. 42-52: on-line at http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/275421…

    Handwriting research on cursive’s lack of observable benefit for students with dyslexia/dysgraphia:

    “Does cursive handwriting have an impact on the reading and spelling performance of children with dyslexic dysgraphia: A quasi-experimental study.” Authors: Lorene Ann Nalpon & Noel Kok Hwee Chia URL: http://www.researchgate.net/publication/23…
    and
    http://dyslexia.yale.edu/EDU_keyboarding.h…

    Zaner-Bloser handwriting survey: Results on-line at http://www.hw21summit.com/media/zb/hw21/fi…

    Ongoing handwriting poll: http://poll.fm/4zac4

    The research most often misrepresented by devotees of cursive (Neural Correlates of Handwriting” by Dr. Karin Harman-James at Indiana University):
    https://www.hw21summit.com/research-harman…

    Background on our handwriting, past and present

    /a/
    2 solidly informed debunkings of the claims for cursive:

    http://nautil.us/issue/40/learning/cursive…

    http://mentalfloss.com/article/86963/learn…

    /b/
    3 videos, by a colleague, show why cursive is NOT a sacrament:

    A BRIEF HISTORY OF CURSIVE
    http://youtu.be/3kmJc3BCu5g

    TIPS TO FIX HANDWRITING
    http://youtu.be/s_F7FqCe6To

    HANDWRITING AND MOTOR MEMORY
    (shows how to develop fine motor skills WITHOUT cursive)
    http://youtu.be/Od7PGzEHbu0

    Yours for better letters,

    Kate Gladstone
    DIRECTOR, the World Handwriting Contest
    CEO, Handwriting Repair/Handwriting That Works
    http://www.HandwritingThatWorks.com
    handwritingrepair@gmail.com

  15. Bravo, Kate Gladstone.

    Really interesting post – thanks for taking the time to provide the source information as well.

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