Cursive losing its signature spot as technology takes over

LANCASTER - Learning cursive handwriting used to be an essential rite of passage.

Writing your name in cursive set you apart from the little kids and set you on your path to a grown-up future in which you would need cursive to write checks, sign contracts, pen letters.

Then computers took over. Now, most people use debit or credit cards, not checks. High school and college students often submit their work electronically. People send e-mail and text messages, and electronic invitations and greeting cards.

Wanda Richie, the English department supervisor at Hempfield High School, surveyed her honors American literature class last week. Fifteen students said they wrote primarily in block print; eight said they used both cursive and block print; not a single student used only cursive.

Elegies to cursive - all most certainly composed on computers - have been published with headlines such as "The Slow Death of Cursive Writing," "The Handwriting is on the Wall," and "The Case for Cursive."

Schools still teach cursive. But its prominence is fading.

Pennsylvania is among the states that have adopted the Common Core Standards in English language arts and mathematics. These standards seek to unify what children across the country are taught. Cursive writing is not included.

"Cursive really is on its way out," said Jill Kennett, who teaches third grade at Brownstown Elementary School in the Conestoga Valley School District. "However, it's not there yet."

Kennett, who is in her 23d year of teaching, said she taught second graders in the Manheim Central School District in 1989. Teachers then blocked out time for teaching cursive, and students had cursive workbooks.

Now, she said, "the emphasis is completely different. It has completely lost its importance."

Kennett has devised an incentive to get pupils interested in cursive. She teaches one cursive letter per day. Once her students learn all the cursive letters, they take a writing test, in the hope of scoring a "cursive writer's license," a little card resembling a driver's license.

In her classroom, once students learn cursive, they do everything in cursive.