New Jersey schools to teach cursive: Is it still relevant?

In one of his final acts as governor before leaving office, Phil Murphy told New Jersey schools what to do again.

He’s done it with Policy 5756. That’s the one he passed off as a binding law when it was only a strongly suggested policy. The one about transgender students and keeping that information from parents.

He’s done it with cell phones. Schools that were already allowed to ban cell phones if they wanted to are now going to be mandated to keep them away from students for the entire day, bell-to-bell. It didn’t need to be that onerous, but here we are.

Because Murphy has always been a guy who likes telling people what they have to do.

Photo by Nedim T. on Unsplash

Cursive is back

Now he’s told schools with a swipe of his pen that they must teach cursive handwriting in third, fourth, and fifth grades.

This completely unnecessary move assures that we are ready to tackle all of the 1980s’ problems. For crying out loud, can we stop with the poor reasons given for cursive being so allegedly important?

We DO NOT need cursive

No, you don’t really need it for your signature. How many people’s signature is even legible? As long as it is a consistent look, THAT becomes your signature. Besides, more and more legal documents are being done with binding e-signatures today. Even my taxes I’ve filed with e-signatures.

No, you don’t need to read cursive to understand what’s in the U.S. Constitution, or any other founding documents. It’s a specious argument at best to claim no one will understand these historical documents when most people have never seen the original parchments to begin with. Millions of times over, the U.S. Constitution has been reproduced online and in textbooks in print form. No understanding of history will be lost. Not to mention, there are plenty of translator apps now where you simply scan cursive and the app changes it to print text to read.

No one is writing handwritten letters anymore. Many high school students aren’t even allowed to turn in handwritten homework any longer. Many schools require all work be done online on school-issued Chromebooks.

I think bringing cursive back by mandate was an emotional decision, not a logical one. What I think is really at play here is nostalgia and fear of getting old. To be told cursive is no longer needed is, I think, making some people feel ancient. We can go back to quaint cursive writing and assignments to send cursive letters to grandma. But that’s not going to make it be 1983 again.