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Gen Z Never Learned to Read Cursive

By Drew Gilpin Faust
Published online in The Atlantic, Sept 16, 2022; slightly abridged for ENGL 1100

It was a good book, the student told the 14 others in the undergraduate seminar I was
teaching, and it included a number of excellent illustrations, such as photographs of relevant
Civil War manuscripts. But, he continued, those weren’t very helpful to him, because of course
he couldn’t read cursive.
Had I heard him correctly? Who else can’t read cursive? I asked the class. The answer:
about two-thirds. And who can’t write it? Even more. What did they do about signatures? They
had invented them by combining vestiges of whatever cursive instruction they may have had
with creative squiggles and flourishes. Amused by my astonishment, the students offered
reflections about the place—or absence—of handwriting in their lives. Instead of the Civil War
past, we found ourselves exploring a different set of historical changes. In my ignorance, I
became their pupil as well as a kind of historical artifact, a Rip van Winkle confronting a
transformed world.
In 2010, cursive was omitted from the new national Common Core standards for K–12
education. The students in my class, and their peers, were then somewhere in elementary school.
Handwriting instruction had already been declining as laptops and tablets and lessons in
“keyboarding” assumed an ever more prominent place in the classroom. Most of my students
remembered getting no more than a year or so of somewhat desultory cursive training, which
was often pushed aside by a growing emphasis on “teaching to the test.” Now in college, they
represent the vanguard of a cursiveless world.
Although I was unaware of it at the time, the 2010 Common Core policy on cursive had
generated an uproar. Laments about the impending decline of civilization appeared in The
Atlantic, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and elsewhere. Defenders of script argued
variously that knowledge of cursive was “a basic right,” a key connection between hand and
brain, an essential form of self-discipline, and a fundamental expression of identity.
Within a decade, cursive’s embattled advocates had succeeded in passing measures
requiring some sort of cursive in more than 20 states. At the same time, the struggle for cursive
became part of a growing, politicized nostalgia for a lost past. In 2016, Louisiana’s state senators
reminded their constituents that the Declaration of Independence had been written in cursive and
cried out “America!” as they unanimously voted to restore handwriting instruction across the
state.
Yet the decline in cursive seems inevitable. Writing is, after all, a technology, and most
technologies are sooner or later surpassed and replaced. As Tamara Plakins Thornton
demonstrates in her book Handwriting in America, it has always been affected by changing
social and cultural forces. In 18th-century America, writing was the domain of the privileged. By
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law or custom, the enslaved were prohibited from literacy almost everywhere. In New England,
nearly all men and women could read; in the South, which had not developed an equivalent
system of common schools, a far lower percentage of even the white population could do so.
Writing, though, was much less widespread—taught separately and sparingly in colonial
America, most often to men of status and responsibility and to women of the upper classes. Men
and women even learned different scripts—an ornamental hand for ladies, and an unadorned,
more functional form for the male world of power and commerce.
The first half of the 19th century saw a dramatic increase in the number of women able to
write. By 1860, more than 90 percent of the white population in America could both read and
write. At the same time, romantic and Victorian notions of subjectivity steadily enhanced the
perceived connection between handwriting and identity. Penmanship came to be seen as a
marker and expression of the self—of gender and class, to be sure, but also of deeper elements of
character and soul. The notion of a signature as a unique representation of a particular individual
gradually came to be enshrined in the law and accepted as legitimate legal evidence.

By the turn of the 20th century, the typewriter had become sufficiently established to
prompt the first widespread declarations of the obsolescence of handwriting. But it would be a
long demise. In 1956, Look magazine pronounced handwriting “out-of-date,” yet cursive still
claimed a secure place in the curriculum for decades.

Given a current generation of students in which so few can read or write cursive, one
cannot assume it will ever again serve as an effective form of communication. I asked my
students about the implications of what they had told me, focusing first on their experience as
students. No, most of these history students admitted, they could not read manuscripts. If they
were assigned a research paper, they sought subjects that relied only on published sources. One
student reshaped his senior honors thesis for this purpose; another reported that she did not
pursue her interest in Virginia Woolf for an assignment that would have involved reading
Woolf’s handwritten letters. In the future, cursive will have to be taught to scholars the way
Elizabethan secretary hand or paleography is today.

I continued questioning: Didn’t professors make handwritten comments on their papers

and exams? Many of the students found these illegible. Sometimes they would ask a teacher to
decipher the comments; more often they just ignored them. Most faculty, especially after the
remote instruction of the pandemic, now grade online. But I wondered how many of my
colleagues have been dutifully offering handwritten observations without any clue that they
would never be read.

What about handwriting in your personal lives? I went on. One student reported that he
had to ask his parents to “translate” handwritten letters from his grandparents. I asked the
students if they made grocery lists, kept journals, or wrote thank-you or condolence letters.
Almost all said yes. Almost all said they did so on laptops and phones or sometimes on paper in
block letters. For many young people, “handwriting,” once essentially synonymous with cursive,
has come to mean the painstaking printing they turn to when necessity dictates.
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During my years as Harvard president, I regarded the handwritten note as a kind of

superpower. I wrote hundreds of them and kept a pile of note cards in the upper-left-hand drawer
of my desk. They provided a way to reach out and say: I am noticing you. This message of
thanks or congratulations or sympathy comes not from some staff person or some machine but
directly from me. I touched it and hope it touches you. Now I wonder how many recipients of
these messages could not read them.

“There is something charming about receiving a handwritten note,” one student

acknowledged. Did he mean charming like an antique curiosity? Charming in the sense of
magical in its capacity to create physical connections between human minds? Charming as in
establishing an aura of the original, the unique, and the authentic? Perhaps all of these. One’s
handwriting is an expression, an offering of self. Crowds still throng athletes, politicians, and
rock stars for autographs. We have not yet abandoned our attraction to handwriting as a
representation of presence: George Washington, or Beyoncé, or David Ortiz wrote here!

There is a great deal of the past we are better off without, just as there is much to
celebrate in the devices that have served as the vehicles of cursive’s demise. But there are
dangers in cursive’s loss. Students will miss the excitement and inspiration that I have seen them
experience as they interact with the physical embodiment of thoughts and ideas voiced by a
person long since silenced by death. Handwriting can make the past seem almost alive in the
present.

All of us, not just students and scholars, will be affected by cursive’s loss. The inability
to read handwriting deprives society of direct access to its own past. We will become reliant on a
small group of trained translators and experts to report what history—including the documents
and papers of our own families—was about. The spread of literacy in the early modern West was
driven by people’s desire to read God’s word for themselves, to be empowered by an experience
of unmediated connection. The abandonment of cursive represents a curious reverse parallel: We
are losing a connection, and thereby disempowering ourselves.

On the last day of class, a student came up to me with a copy of one of my books and
asked me to sign it. I wrote an inscription that included not just his name and mine, but thanks
for his many contributions to the seminar. Then I asked, a little wistfully, if he’d like me to read
it to him.

Drew Gilpin Faust is a contributing writer at The Atlantic, and a former president of Harvard
University, where she is the Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor. She is the author of six
books.