FULLERTON, California (Reuters) - A generation of children who learned to write on screens is now going old school.
Starting this year, California grade school students are required to learn cursive handwriting, after the skill had fallen out of fashion in the computer age.
Assembly Bill 446, sponsored by former elementary school teacher Sharon Quirk-Silva and signed into law in October, requires handwriting instruction for the 2.6 million Californians in grades one to six, roughly ages 6 to 12, and cursive lessons for the “appropriate” grade levels - generally considered to be third grade and above.
Experts say learning cursive improves cognitive development, reading comprehension and fine motor skills, among other benefits. Some educators also find value in teaching children to read historic documents and family letters from generations past.
If you are European it may be surprising to learn that most of the world’s cursive is not the same as the US. Learning cursive in much of the world is closer to joined-writing, where the form is more personal to the individual and the explicit purpose is speed (at least for right handed people). Learning cursive in the US is learning a bastardized form of joined-writing that has much lost its original purpose as a side effect of attempting to heavily standardize its form.