The Writing on the Wall

As cash-strapped communities across New England chop up the elementary experience -- taking out music, art, physical education, keyboarding, foreign language, and library science -- cursive has curiously eluded the ax. Principals and school committees are pushing hard on every aspect of the curriculum, yet no one seems to be wondering why children learn cursive anymore. It's like asking why students still learn the Virginia reel in gym class. Answer: They just do.

However you may feel about the mysteries of capital Q and cursive X, it's hard to ignore the fact that penmanship does not much matter anymore. It isn't on the MCAS or the SATs, and it's not required by the admissions board of any US college or university. Cursive handwriting isn't mentioned anywhere in the state's K-12 curriculum frameworks either. "You can't do the things in the English language curriculum without handwriting, but handwriting itself isn't in there," says Susan Wheltle, director of the office of humanities at the Massachusetts Department of Education. "We've left it up to the individual schools to decide how they're going to teach it."

Williams teaches it old school, right down to the under curve, check stroke, and down curve. He vigilantly "shadows" all his students' writing, tracing over their samples in his own perfect hand to show them where their letters are, literally, falling down. And though some cursive textbooks have softened up on certain letters, Williams will have none of it. "I'm a bit of a purist. I follow the real traditional alphabet," he says.

Cursive does offer immediate academic benefits, experts say: It triggers the thought processes connected to storing and retrieving information in memory, and it helps early and intermediate readers link letters to sounds and spelling.

Yet the window for learning cursive, and using it, seems to close a little more every year. Some elementary schools still teach cursive over several years, but others, like Williams's school, now cram it into a single year, third grade.

By middle school, just three years on, some teachers are already allowing, or even requiring, typed printouts of students' work. Williams has even heard scandalous rumors of middle-school instructors actively discouraging cursive papers -- because they can't read their students' handwriting.

Out in the grown-up world, college students use WiFi'd laptops to take notes and instant-message one another during lectures. Office workers use Palm Pilots, PCs, and Post-it notes; service workers use keypads, bar-code scanners, data wands, and integrated telephone headsets.

As a personal identifier, the signature is being eclipsed by faster and more accurate biometrics methodologies, like thumbprints and iris scans, that have, in these security-conscious days, finally shaken off the taint of Big Brother that had previously slowed their acceptance.

That leaves personal checks, thank-you notes, journals (those that haven't gone blog, of course), and credit-card receipts as cursive handwriting's main customers.

So is it curtains for cursive? Perhaps not quite yet. News of handwriting's death has been greatly exaggerated for decades, says Tamara Plakins Thornton in her 1996 book, Handwriting in America: A Cultural History. As early as 1960, pundits were predicting the demise of penmanship as the world embraced the advent of the cheap portable typewriter, Thornton reports.

That never happened, of course, any more than the computer brought about the paperless office or telecommuting killed the cubicle, two other errant predictions from decades past. Yet even in the few years since Thornton's book appeared, there's no denying that the way we communicate has changed dramatically. If you don't believe that, text me on my Bluetooth vidcam cell, and we'll "talk."

For his part, Mark Williams is a modern enough guy -- a Doc Martens-wearing dude who teaches after-school classes on HyperStudio -- to concede that cursive might not make the grade in the future. "It could be that down the road it becomes obsolete," says Williams pensively. "I hope not. I think of it as an art form, and I think it's beautiful."