As of Independence Day, 2012, forty-five of the fifty United States have adopted the Common Core curriculum in their public elementary schools. Those states are now in the process of phasing out the teaching of cursive writing, which, apparently, does not accord with the mission statement of the curriculum’s framers: to impart skills that are “robust and relevant” to the modern world.
I grew up in the nineteen-fifties, when the art of penmanship was taught to every schoolchild in America, and prized as a sign of cultivation. I loved ruling the blank pages of my copybook, then filling the spaces between the lines with shapely letters–“M” and “W” were my favorite capitals; “j” and “y” my favorite minuscules. If I had not learned to write cursive, I probably never would have learned to read it, and my archival work as a biographer–deciphering the handwritten letters of men and women born in the nineteenth century, or the early decades of the twentieth–would have been extremely arduous, if not impossible. A knowledge of cursive may not be “relevant” to the modern world, but it is essential to a visceral sense of the past, and an ability to examine the literature, correspondence, and history contained in original documents.