Cursive writing carries a nostalgia, but should it be mandatory in schools ? | Opinion

As I was taking notes for this column, I thought it fitting to write them in cursive, a skill I spent many hours mastering when I was a kid in school. And, now there’s another push to bring cursive instruction back into Missouri schools. Not everyone is so happy about the idea, though.

Someone somewhere who struggled to write and read in cursive when they were learning it before it was largely kicked out of schools after 2010 to prioritize keyboarding, is probably reading this and screaming, "Why? " And I talked to a few teachers who are probably reading it and screaming, “No way.”

For several years, a bipartisan group of Missouri lawmakers has tried to make cursive writing mandatory instruction in K-12 schools.

HB 2230, also known as the “Student Screen-Time Standards Act,” was advanced in the Missouri House of Representatives this week. It aims to increase student proficiency in reading and writing cursive by the end of fifth grade and curb the time students spend on screens at school.

When I was a kid, I actually loved my penmanship, and using my fountain pen, a gift from my uncle who made it his personal mission to make sure my siblings and I wrote beautifully in cursive.

Because, let’s face it, there’s nothing all that pretty about regular old print or manuscript. And since letter writing is having a resurgence these days, particularly among millennials and Gen Z, who are experiencing a bit of digital fatigue, pretty cursive writing certainly makes a letter look a lot better.

All that said, since Missouri and several other states are looking at bringing cursive back as mandatory learning in elementary school education, I thought I’d reach out to a few people who either have been or would be responsible for teaching cursive to children.

Teachers for or against cursive

I wondered what teachers might have to say about Missouri’s cursive bill.

Several of the ones I talked to were strongly against it, for what I must say were pretty good reasons. Others had some mixed feelings.

As you might have figured out by now, personally, I love the idea. I know there is more to cursive writing than loops and strokes. It develops a child’s fine motor skills and requires focus and patience. All things that I believe have been stripped by technology, which has reduced nearly everything to a click of a button.

I mentioned that to Carter Taylor, who teaches second grade in Kansas City Public Schools. She had a great comeback, “So do puzzles,” Taylor said. “Puzzles help motor skills, too.”

Taylor is not a fan of mandatory cursive instruction. She said teachers already have more minutes of mandatory instruction to teach than there are minutes in a school day.

Forcing cursive instruction on teachers and students, Taylor said, “is out of touch.” She said there are so many other skills students need and would benefit from more, like how to use a search engine, how to research facts online, and basic reading and writing.

And, Taylor said, pen-and-paper instruction is expensive, and so are the workbooks needed to teach students cursive writing. She said pushing for cursive writing in schools is a “conservative vanity project. It’s conservatives worried that the skills you learned are going away.”

Cindy Berryman, a retired Independence teacher, said her feelings are mixed. Like me, she loves the idea of students learning cursive writing, and she thinks “it’s a beautiful skill for students to have,” but she too, wondered where in the day teachers would find the time for that instruction. “They already are asked to do too much,” Berryman said.

Her husband, Steve, used to teach elementary school, and when she asked him about the Missouri bill, he said he just doesn’t think that in today’s digital world, cursive writing is something teachers should have to spend their time on.

Reduced screen time

I was thinking that since the bill would also reduce screen time for children in kindergarten through 5th grade, which is something a lot of parents have wanted for years, because of concerns that it hurts kids, then maybe that would free up time for kids to learn cursive.

A Hechinger Report, published by the New York Times in March, said: “There’s mounting evidence that excessive screen time can harm young children — contributing to anxiety and depression, delaying social and emotional skills, increasing the likelihood of obesity, straining eyes, and decreasing attention spans.” That’s a lot of damage.

And the chairman of the Missouri House Elementary and Secondary Education Committee, Rep. Ed Lewis, a Republican from Moberly, told MissouriNet — a statewide news operation — “We have come to some consensus as to how much screen time, especially in elementary grades, students need to be exposed to. We’ve gone the wrong way. Sometimes we have to admit we were wrong.”

But a lot of teachers are not in favor of that, either. Taylor is one. She’s against getting rid of digital learning devices in school. “We went digital to save money,” Taylor said. “Ink and paper are expensive,” she said, and teachers end up footing the bill.

As much as I am nostalgic about cursive writing, I realize that I am not in the classroom, nor are Lewis and other Missouri lawmakers. We do not see what our teachers see every day as they try providing kids with the best education they can offer with the time and money they are given.

I do think we ask a lot of teachers. Taylor agrees, and says, “If you want good teachers in the classroom then pay them more, and if you want students learning on paper, then pay for the paper, the ink, the workbooks, the resources.”

Or, she suggests, “make cursive optional, not mandatory. Maybe make it part of the arts curriculum so that students can find joy in learning it.”

I can’t argue with any of that. I think the lesson here, for all of us, is that if we really want to know what kids need to be learning in school, how they should learn it and what resources teachers need to teach it to them, we should probably ask the teachers and then listen to what they have to say.

This story was originally published April 6, 2026 at 5:09 AM.