Our senior class was one of the last classes to learn cursive. Cursive is not considered “needed” anymore. However, cursive is very important, especially after high school. Everyone needs to be able to sign their name, at the very least. 

Learning cursive handwriting is important for spelling skills, enabling children to recognize words when they read them later. Typing doesn’t have the same effect on the brain, as it doesn’t require the same fine motor skills and simultaneous activity. Some high school students can barely sign their name, let alone be able to read cursive at all. Cursive was used in the olden days, as an easier way of writing. Individual people have different handwriting, but when it comes to cursive, basically they are all read and written the same way. It makes it easier for other people to not have to guess the words or what people wrote. 

Cursive is important for the development of our left frontal lobes. According to How Life Unfolds, “Cursive gets the entire brain working. And reading cursive also activates different parts of the brain than printed text—one study found that in all cases they studied, when they presented information to the left hemisphere of the brain fewer errors occurred than when it was presented to the right hemisphere.” As elementary kids grow, since they aren’t learning cursive, technically their brains are underdeveloped. 

However, as others have stated, it seems to have gone by the wayside because everyone figures that it’s no longer needed because of the digital age. Mostly everything now is online, therefore we don’t have to worry about having to be able to read cursive. The big question remains: Isn’t printing just as effective as cursive? One often-cited study from the 1970s has shown that first-grade children who learned cursive writing scored better in spelling and reading than those who simply learned how to print. 

Cursive is very important to the development of young children and not being taught said skill, the young children are missing out. According to CBC News, “ Cursive writing will become mandatory in schools starting this fall”. Some states have made a mandatory law that schools must teach cursive, it is slowly making its way back to the elementary schools.