Today only 14 states require that cursive handwriting be taught
A COLUMN By Kathryn Ross,
I remember as a child watching my mother as she sat at the kitchen table practicing her signature before she signed a document or paid a bill. She would sit at that old, yellow-topped, Formica table for what seemed like hours to me, signing and resigning her signature until she got it just right, line after line in beautiful flowing script of just her name, Pearl Elizabeth Ross.
Mom grew up in the Great Depression. She was born in 1921. Her education was interrupted a lot as she grew up in Harrison Valley, Pa. and her family of five brothers and one sister and a nephew, moved from farm to farm, town to town from Greenwood and Jasper to Westfield and back. She was the youngest child. He father had died when she was just seven. She often, usually during the winter, attended one-room schoolhouses. We never took a car ride to Westfield, Pa. to visit relatives that Mom didn’t point to some lonely, dilapidated building clinging to a hillside without saying “I went to school there.”
Mom, like many in her generation, gave up on school in the seventh grade and went to work. She was 15 when she moved to Wellsville to be with her mother who had left the farm life behind and had taken a job as a cook and housekeeper. That is when Mom met my father. She lied about her age and went to work as first a housecleaner, and then a waitress. Mom always aspired to a better life, which was one of the reasons she was so adamant that her signature look right.
The other day a story caught my eye, “Cursive Reading Is a Superpower”. It went on to say, “The National Archives needs help from people with a special set of skills–reading cursive. The archival bureau is seeking volunteer citizen archivists to help them classify and/or transcribe more than 200 years-worth of hand-written historical documents. Most of these are from the Revolutionary War-era, known for looped and flowing penmanship and range from Revolutionary War pension records to the field notes of Charles Mason of the Mason-Dixon Line, to immigration documents from the 1890s, to Japanese evacuation records from the’40s, to the 1950 Census.
“Reading cursive is a superpower,” said Suzanne Isaacs, a community manager with the National Archives Catalog in Washington D.C. who coordinates more than 5,000 Citizen Archivists helping the Archive read and transcribe the records.
“We create missions where we ask volunteers to help us transcribe or tag records in our catalog,” Isaacs said. To volunteer, all that’s required is to sign up online and then launch in. “There’s no application,” she said. “You just pick a record that hasn’t been done and read the instructions. It’s easy to do for a half hour a day or a week.”
Handwriting was considered a necessary skill until the 1990s when many people shifted to e-mail and then in the 2000s to texting.
The article went on to say, “by 2010, the Common Core teaching standards emphasized keyboard skills (once taught as “typewriting”) and no longer required handwriting on the presumption that most of the writing students would do would be on computers. That led to a pushback. Today only 14 states require that cursive handwriting be taught, including California which changed its scholastic requirement in 2023. The New York State Board of Education does not require cursive writing to be taught, however local boards of education can decide for themselves.”
I remember well under the instruction of Miss Geffers and Mrs. Larson sitting at my desks in Washington School practicing my penmanship. I recall trying to copy the letters on those cards that hung above the blackboard. Although never as beautiful as my Mother’s script, I was proud of my handwriting. Forty years of taking notes ruined that. I can hardly read my own handwriting these days.
Scientists say that writing in cursive is good for the brain, because each movement requires thought and concentration. It is both artistic and thought-provoking. But I have to disagree that texting is mindless and lazy. It takes some creativity to come up with all those acronyms that I can never figure out and seem so stupid until someone tells me what the letters stand for.
Still, as with the demise of newspapers, the inability to read and write cursive will lead to a historical tragedy as decades of photos and stories and more will not only be lost to the public, but also our history.
Kathryn Ross is a veteran reporter, writer, and columnist who is active in several local media outlets. You can reach her anytime, kathr_2002@yahoo.com
