Students are seen working on their cursive writing in Oceanhawk’s third-grade class at Encompass Academy in East Oakland in 2012.
Much of the news relating to California’s education system this past year was, to put it mildly, concerning.
State data released in October shows that fewer than 35% of students met or exceeded state standards for math and fewer than 47% reached or surpassed standards for English language arts in the 2022-23 school year — scores that remain stubbornly below pre-pandemic averages. In a move that will likely worsen the situation, the state Board of Education in July overhauled California’s math framework, which could make it more difficult for students to take advanced math courses.
Starting Jan. 1, however, we can count on some encouraging news: All elementary school students will be required to learn cursive writing under a bill signed into law by Gov. Gavin Newsom.
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Compared to subjects such as computer science and math — which often translate to high-paying jobs and undergird modern technology — cursive writing may seem frivolous, an outdated relic with no more relevance than a quill pen or a typewriter. What’s the point of learning how to write fancy letters by hand when so much of the writing we produce and consume these days is digital? Why should schools take time away from more important subjects to teach a skill that seems to be largely obsolete — apart from our quickly scribbled signatures on receipts and formal documents?
These were among the questions that Assembly Member Sharon Quirk-Silva, D-Fullerton, fielded when she introduced the cursive writing bill — prior versions of which failed to pass the state Legislature. But Quirk-Silva, who taught elementary school for more than 30 years, argues that cursive writing instruction is critically important.
She’s right.
Research suggests that learning cursive writing — as opposed to typing — helps young students integrate their motor and perceptual skills and retain and learn information while increasing their likelihood of future academic success.
In an interview, Quirk-Silva told me that she estimates only about 50% of California elementary school districts currently teach cursive writing, which she suspects has led to fewer low-income students and students of color learning how to read and write the beautifully shaped letters.
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That, in turn, has restricted those students’ ability to interact with key historical documents written in cursive, such as the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution and even journals and letters written by family members, Quirk-Silva said.
“We can get (a lot of) these passages online,” Quirk-Silva told me, “but reading online or on a computer is a much different experience” than interacting with a primary document in its original form.
I vividly remember learning cursive writing in elementary school. I was transfixed by the gorgeousness of the letters, which I at first found confoundingly difficult to replicate — especially the uppercase G and S, with their complicated curlicues and swoops.
Things became even more difficult when we had to start joining the letters together, but I loved completing a paragraph in cursive and marveling at how the words and sentences flowed together.
Indeed, there is a satisfaction, a joy, in writing by hand that is almost impossible to replicate when typing on a computer — a joy that I trace in part to learning cursive when I was young.
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This pleasure in stringing letters together — both literally and figuratively — helped inspire me to become a writer and continues to aid me in my craft.
There’s a clarity, a sense of discovery, that comes with writing by hand. Whenever my mind feels mudded, I write in a journal by hand. Doing so seems to unlock a flow-of-consciousness that helps me process my thoughts in ways I sometimes can’t when sitting in front of a glowing Microsoft Word document, staring at a blinking cursor.
I’ve also found that writing by hand helps me retain information, which is why I took all my notes in college by hand instead of typing them on a computer. I did the same in grade school — we didn’t have school-issued laptops and submitted everything on paper. That’s no longer the case across much of California, especially following the pandemic’s rapid transition to remote learning.
But in relying on tools that obviate the need for writing by hand, we haven’t paused to ask ourselves what we might lose in the process.
In an increasingly utilitarian world, there is something radical in honing a skill that many would deem unnecessary, in learning and appreciating something for its own sake and not merely its external market value.
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Yet even as technology risks making writing by hand a relic of the past, it could paradoxically lead to its resurgence.
I recently reconnected with some of my college professors, who told me that they were now making students write essays by hand in class to prevent them from submitting pieces written by the artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT.
Such developments highlight the importance of Quirk-Silva’s law, which is specifically about the value of cursive writing but also generally about the value of writing by hand.
“It is amazing how far technology has moved forward in education, and there is definitely a place for all of that,” Quirk-Silva said. “But as we move forward in the AI time period, there’s going to be verification more and more of who’s writing what.”
“The good old paper and pencil,” she said, “may end up being something that reemerges.”
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The more things change, the more they stay the same. Far from having outgrown cursive writing, we’re now turning to it with a new sense of urgency: to prove that we are human.
Reach Emily Hoeven: emily.hoeven@sfchronicle.com; Twitter: @emily_hoeven
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