Is Cursive a Dying Art?

Aurora Khatibi Garrity, News Editor|February 5, 2021

Let’s all rewind to elementary school: after weeks of tracing letters in workbooks and practicing calligraphy, we now sit at our respective desks, looking down at a cursive exam. 

As a kid I wasn’t amazing at cursive, but I’ve been doing fine without it! In an age where legibility in writing isn’t even a guarantee, I hardly see the advantage of children enduring the long process of learning loopy penmanship.

Cursive may allow for the creation of a unique signature and the ability to write faster, but that’s about it. It seems to serve little to no purpose in the daily lives of the human race.

Exposing students to cursive as a creative outlet is lovely, but teachers are not conveying this as a reason to learn cursive.

Senior Aidan Gutierrez, an avid cursive user, believes that the elegance of cursive holds a place in history that should be passed on to future generations.

“I always keep a letter that my grandmother wrote for me, and it’s in the most beautiful cursive I have ever seen. I find it artistic,” Gutierrez said.

Cursive might have a high historical value, as it was used for writing formal thank you letters and the American Constitution, but the past shouldn’t necessarily dictate the present. “In the end, people can write how they want to write,” Gutierrez said. 

In 2010, the Common Core State Standards Initiative dropped the teaching of cursive from public educational facilities, but 21 states have reinstated cursive as an educational requirement, saying it allows students to take notes more quickly and create a signature.

Today, where technology allows an array of cursive fonts to be discovered at the click of a button, it seems cursive has found a way to live on without being a mandatory mechanical skill.

The main concern regarding penmanship is teaching generations to simply write legibly, and the next step should be how to type faster on a keyboard. In 2021, many of us have become less strict with handwriting, and I for one would like to be able to comprehend my future co-workers’ handwriting.