William Marvel: Semiliterates

Last spring, I hired a young fellow to do some chores while I was away, but when I handed him a handwritten list he stared at it for a few seconds with a perplexed expression before admitting that he couldn’t read it. My penmanship is still quite legible, especially when I’m writing carefully for someone else’s benefit, but at 12 years old he simply couldn’t read cursive handwriting.

Declining public-school attention to cursive writing has been lamented and lambasted with particular vigor in the past decade, especially after states began swallowing the Common Core Standards, which ignored handwriting. In 2013, West Lebanon’s Valley News observed that public schools were phasing out the teaching of handwriting. According to that story, the president of a teachers’ union near Washington, D.C., called it a “dying art” that wasted precious classroom time — time such as Conway grade-schoolers spend learning “mindfulness” and how to “appreciate diversity,” or participating in the ski program.