I’ve been holding onto this web page for months with the intention of writing about it, so perhaps the time has come.

I’ve seen reports from time to time over the past few years that many schools were no longer teaching cursive writing, and I thought that was foolish in the extreme. It seems to me that cursive ought to be one of the fundamentals, even though we now live in the digital age.

Then a few months ago, the governor of our state signed into law a bill mandating that cursive writing be taught in Pennsylvania schools as an essential skill. Good for Josh Shapiro and good for the legislators on both sides of the aisle who passed it!

Except PZ Myers, a blogger and biology prof whom I usually respect, wasn’t having it:

Nope. It’s not an essential skill anymore. You can sign a check with a barely legible scrawl…it’s still accepted. The President of the US can sign bills with a peculiar string of pointy squiggles that is completely illegible…it still works, unfortunately. When I have to sign a series of papers, it starts out OK, but I use a kind of sloppy block printing, and by the time I’m done the “yers” in my last name has eroded down into a kind of uneven flood plain. That’s a really stupid reason to force kids to write in cursive.

Also, Shapiro has a law degree, not an education degree. He is not qualified to tell people what educational initiatives are “fundamental”. Leave that to educators.

Hey, PZ, there are other reasons to learn cursive besides signing checks; the governor merely gave one example.

Oh, and PZ, what makes you think that during the long legislative process that it took for this to become a law that educators were not consulted? I see this as an example of the legislative process actually working for a change. Perhaps you ought to stick to biology.

So I was gratified to come across scientific evidence that cursive writing—well, writing by hand anyway—actually makes us think better:

As traditional handwriting is progressively being replaced by digital devices, it is essential to investigate the implications for the human brain. Brain electrical activity was recorded in 36 university students as they were handwriting visually presented words using a digital pen and typewriting the words on a keyboard. Connectivity analyses were performed on EEG data recorded with a 256-channel sensor array. When writing by hand, brain connectivity patterns were far more elaborate than when typewriting on a keyboard, as shown by widespread theta/alpha connectivity coherence patterns between network hubs and nodes in parietal and central brain regions. Existing literature indicates that connectivity patterns in these brain areas and at such frequencies are crucial for memory formation and for encoding new information and, therefore, are beneficial for learning. Our findings suggest that the spatiotemporal pattern from visual and proprioceptive information obtained through the precisely controlled hand movements when using a pen, contribute extensively to the brain’s connectivity patterns that promote learning. We urge that children, from an early age, must be exposed to handwriting activities in school to establish the neuronal connectivity patterns that provide the brain with optimal conditions for learning. Although it is vital to maintain handwriting practice at school, it is also important to keep up with continuously developing technological advances. Therefore, both teachers and students should be aware of which practice has the best learning effect in what context, for example when taking lecture notes or when writing an essay.

It’s something that I’ve noticed in myself, that when I actually write something down with pen and paper, I’m far more likely to remember it.

I’m curious if the lack of cursive writing has actually contributed to making younger generations stupider. Because it really does seem to me that this country is getting stupider every day.