Law requiring cursive writing goes into effect next year

Assistant Majority Leader Kimberly A. Lightford (D-Maywood)
Assistant Majority Leader Kimberly A. Lightford (D-Maywood)

Law requiring cursive writing goes into effect next year

By Lisette Gushiniere

Armed with pen, paper and plenty of research, educators, experts and others have long debated the pros and cons of teaching cursive writing.

Under House Bill 2977, the law in Illinois is settled. Starting with the 2018-2019 school year, public elementary schools will have to provide a unit of cursive handwriting instruction.

Teachers will be required to teach the subject by the time a student reaches the 5th grade and districts will determine by local policy at what grade levels the instruction would be implemented.

Assistant Majority Leader Kimberly A. Lightford (D-Maywood), who led the initiative said, “There are a number of benefits to learning cursive including the development of motor skills, being able to write and endorse checks, signing legal documents and reading our Constitution.”

The Common Core State Standards Initiative details what K–12 students should know in English language arts and mathematics at the end of each grade. The initiative has been criticized for the policy on cursive writing. While keyboarding skills are required, the policy is silent on cursive writing. Students are required however, to learn to write with print letters.

As a result of a failure to mention cursive writing in the Common Core State Standards, many school districts have limited or even dropped handwriting instruction altogether.

Dr. William R. Klemm, a senior professor of Neuroscience at Texas A&M University and author of 20 books argues cursive writing has many benefits and actually makes kids smarter.

“Scientists are discovering that learning cursive is an important tool for cognitive development, particularly in training the brain to learn ‘functional specialization,’ that is capacity for optimal efficiency,”

Klemm wrote in Memory Medic in 2014.

When it comes to deciding the effectiveness of using the pen verses the keyboard, Klemm added, “Brain imaging studies show that cursive activates areas of the brain that do not participate in keyboarding. Much of the benefit of hand writing in general comes simply from the self-generated mechanics of drawing letters,” he said.

Recent research also shows that handwriting may impact literacy, memory, and motor skills.

The Association for Psychological Science reports that while research, “investigating a direct causal link between handwriting and general literacy is sparse...data from neuroimaging studies hint that handwriting could support literacy skills involved in both reading and writing.”

Children need to be able to enroll in college, buy a house and even complete their voter registration forms, Lightford stated, adding, these are everyday tasks requiring a signature, she said.

Generations of people and children are missing out due to a lack of instruction in cursive writing, Lightford continued.

“Students have missed out on developing motor skills and creativity as cursive can be considered an art form,” she said.

“Many children have also lost the opportunity to interact with grandparents and great-grandparents through writing, which puts them at risk of losing their connection to the past,” she added.

Philip Ball author of The Water Kingdom: A Secret History of China, admits cursive writing has its benefits, but imposing it on children at an early age in the classroom is yet another matter, he contends. On nautil.us, Ball writes, “our real understanding of how children respond to different writing styles is surprisingly patchy and woefully inadequate,” he said.

Like two sides of a clean sheet of paper, views by proponents and opponents tend to vary.

According to the Associated Press, Republican Rep. Steven Andersson of Geneva said, cursive does not help develop young minds any better than printing. A legal document doesn’t need a signature, he says, but only requires a “mark”.

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