A new bill was passed in California on October 13, 2023. Assemblywoman Sharon Quirk-Silva instigated Assembly Bill 466. This bill requires first through sixth graders to be taught lessons incorporating cursive. Teachers are now legally required to teach cursive to their students. The goal is for students to be able to understand and write in cursive, as Quirk-Sliva told The Sacramento Bee. This bill will be acted out at the beginning of 2024.
Cursive stopped becoming a required thing to learn in California in 2010. Even so, many students still remember being taught cursive despite it not being required. It depends on what school district a student is from in California and whether that school district decides to keep implementing cursive.
Cursive is a critical writing and communication tool. Many important historical American documents have been written in cursive. If people don’t care to learn the past, they are bound to repeat history. Students must understand what they are taught in history class and why it is essential. If they can’t read documents such as the Declaration of Independence or letters that soldiers from the Civil War wrote, how can they truly grasp the significance of history? The answer is they can’t. Of course, they could always be shown these documents in a regular printed-out font, but students won’t get the same feeling as reading the real or a copy of the real thing.
Society has very much become a place on the internet. All sorts of information can be found on phones, tablets, laptops, and computers. Laptops are rapidly replacing ordinary “pencil to paper” ways. Social media is also at its all-time rise, and because of this, there has been no need to write since phones are the best way to communicate. However, this loss of penmanship is a terrible thing. Studies by the Norwegian University of Science and Technology show that writing is the best way to go if school districts want students to have an optimal learning experience. It activates their brains in a way that typing on a keyboard can’t do.
Cursive is a beautiful skill to have. Many students struggle with neat and legible handwriting abilities, and cursive writing could be a solution. Not only is it a faster way to write, but if everyone is taught how to read it, no one’s handwriting can be illegible.
Coming back to technology, with the rise of AI, it is very likely that essays will now have to be handwritten to ensure no cheating is happening. These essays could be written in cursive so that students have a fast way of writing, and teachers can also have readable handwriting to grade.
Other states other than California also see cursive’s importance too. The following seventeen states have laws that make cursive a requirement for their students to know. These states are Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia. Cursive is making a massive comeback to elementary school education.
