Is this the end of cursive writing?

In today's schools, the keyboard is king. But studies suggests that penmanship still matters.

from the November 14, 2007 edition

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"You don't teach someone English by first teaching them Chinese," Ms. Glad­stone says. "We need to decide what the best way to handwrite is and just teach that."

That does not sit well with cursive traditionalists. "Hand­writing is an emotionally charged issue," Gladstone adds. "I get letters from people calling me anti-American because I don't like what they think of as 'proper' cursive."

Gladstone promotes italic cursive, which she says is the fastest, most natural, and most easily readable form of handwriting. It's also the easiest and quickest to teach children, she says. She also claims it's the fastest-growing way to teach handwriting: 7 percent of students are learning this method, compared with 1 percent ten years ago. For homeschoolers, that number is 1 in 3, she says.

She recommends traditional cursive be an elective that children could take after elementary school if they wanted to.

That idea has no appeal for O'Donnell Elementary's Dr. Martin. Back when he was a middle-school principal, he realized many students couldn't read cursive, let alone write it. "I said, 'If I ever get to be an elementary school principal, I'm doing something about this,' " he says. That's why he recently introduced Handwriting Without Tears and the "magic bunny" to his school, which he found to be an effective and fun method.

"We're used to thinking about nuns rapping the knuckles of kids who couldn't write the perfectly shaped letter.... I remember when I was a kid, we had the Palmer Method...." He recalls the rote cursive instruction and copying upper- and lower-case letters pinned to a board at the front of the classroom.

The Palmer and Zaner-Bloser penmanship methods ruled the day for decades. Students spent 45 minutes every day on handwriting. Penmanship was a separate grade on report cards. Today, handwriting instruction might get 10 or 15 minutes a few times a week. Keyboarding skills are taught much earlier, now.

But in this era of standardized testing, Gladstone says, teachers need to train their charges to express themselves quickly with a pen or pencil. And that means italic cursive, to her.

"Students need to be able to write about 100 letters a minute on these tests," she says, "but I know a lot of high schoolers can only do 30 per minute."

It may be too late to halt cursive's decline. Fewer and fewer teachers today know how to write cursive themselves.

"I've actually seen teachers give cursive instruction by saying, 'Just follow the book,' " Gladstone says. "And when a child asks the teacher to demonstrate it herself, she'll say, 'I'll try, but I'm really not so good at this.' How can we expect kids to learn cursive if the teachers have trouble with it?" A recent study Graham conducted on handwriting instruction found that only 12 percent of teachers had taken a course in how to teach handwriting.

Instead of focusing on what type of handwriting is best, Graham suggests that schools concentrate on improving students' handwriting, period, whatever it is.

"Two out of three kids in this country do not write well enough for their classroom work," he says. "Handwriting is a small part of the overall writing picture."

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