For generations of American schoolchildren, learning to read and write cursive was a rite of passage. Until the early 20th century, children in the U.S. were generally taught to write in cursive, or script, rather than the print handwriting typically taught to young children today. At the time, some people even believed a person's character could be judged by the quality of their cursive.

During the first half of the 20th century, penmanship was often taught as a distinct subject in American elementary schools, and children could spend as much as 45 minutes a day on handwriting instruction and practice. Students in those years generally learned print in kindergarten, first, and second grade, with cursive typically introduced in third grade or later — partly because some child development researchers of the era believed print was easier for young children to learn and matched the fonts they encountered when reading.

I am a product of this system. I learned cursive in third grade and won awards for my penmanship from the retired nuns who once worked at my Catholic school. Today, I am a clinical professor of literacy studies and a teacher-educator who researches reading and writing. My experience, however, is no longer typical: cursive instruction has become less popular over the past few decades. Now, some states and schools are reconsidering its value for today's students.

A shift away from cursive

By the 1980s, the instructional time devoted to cursive in some schools had fallen from 45 minutes a day to between 30 and 60 minutes per week. The time allotted kept shrinking, in part because of the standards-based movement of the 1990s, which packed school curricula with content. New math standards called for data analysis and probability to be woven into mathematics education beginning in the early grades, including kindergarten. Social studies standards, meanwhile, embraced a broader approach to history that gave greater attention to figures such as Mansa Musa, who led the Mali empire in the early 1300s.

At the same time, computers became more widely available in schools and in homes, making the ability to type on keyboards seem like a necessary skill. Cursive began to look antiquated. The Common Core state standards — a nationwide set of academic learning standards for K–12 students, adopted in some fashion by 45 states between 2009 and 2014 — called for kids to learn how to type on keyboards, effectively ensuring that whatever valuable teaching time remained for transcription would be spent on learning how to type.

A return to cursive?

It did not take long for the pendulum to begin swinging back in favor of cursive in the early 2010s. Framed as a back-to-basics issue, North Carolina passed the nation's first cursive law in 2013, requiring students to read and write in cursive by the end of fifth grade. The law also required children to memorize their multiplication tables. By 2015, 14 other states had some form of cursive instruction requirement on the books. As of 2026, more than 25 states — including Pennsylvania, Florida, California, and Michigan — require cursive instruction. The mandates parallel another back-to-basics wave in state capitols: since 2019, dozens of states have also passed “science of reading” laws requiring phonics-based reading instruction, a sign of lawmakers' renewed appetite for prescribing classroom basics.

Lawmakers cite a range of reasons for mandating cursive in schools. Legislators in Pennsylvania and Florida argue, for example, that an informed citizenry needs to be able to read historical documents, which are often written in cursive script — the engrossed originals of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution among them. In 2025, a Michigan representative suggested that reading cursive was also essential to preserving family history: her granddaughter was able to read a letter that her deceased father — the lawmaker's son — had written in cursive only because her school still chose to teach the skill. A California assembly member had more modern realities in mind, suggesting that cursive could be used to ensure students aren't using artificial intelligence to complete their schoolwork. That concern reflects a much larger debate in American education. Since ChatGPT's public release in November 2022, teachers have struggled to distinguish student writing from machine-generated text, and automated detection tools have proved unreliable — OpenAI withdrew its own AI-text classifier in 2023, citing its low rate of accuracy. Handwritten assignments, unlike typed ones, cannot be conjured by a chatbot from a prompt, which is the logic behind the California proposal.

Benefits of cursive

Being able to write in cursive can have benefits for learners. A 2020 study conducted in Norway connected 12 adults and 12 preteens to brain-imaging devices while they wrote in cursive, drew, and typed. The researchers found that writing in cursive activates the brain waves and neural pathways used for learning and for memory. Learning to write in cursive is also associated with better outcomes for learners with dyslexia and dysgraphia, a neurological learning disability that makes writing difficult.

Other studies have shown cursive's impact on writing fluency and quality. Some research indicates that cursive can help people write faster, while other studies have found that children writing in cursive may have no speed advantage at all. First graders in Portugal who were taught cursive wrote in longer “bursts,” which the researchers attributed to the unbroken flow of cursive writing.

There is even research suggesting that cursive gives students an early boost in reading, not just composition. A 2019 study of 141 first graders found that children taught cursive read better by the end of the school year than classmates who were not. One theory is that learning cursive trains the brain to process letters more effectively.

Cursive in today's world

Not everyone is convinced cursive deserves a comeback tour. For starters, the science is shakier than cursive's champions let on. There is solid evidence that handwriting beats typing for learning and memory. What is much less clear is whether cursive specifically holds an edge over ordinary print. It is possible that much of the recent brain research being cited in statehouses from Pennsylvania to California was conducted on children printing their letters, not looping them together.

Teaching cursive in today's schools is also not necessarily simple. Many of today's teachers — and many of tomorrow's — never learned cursive themselves, which means states are now asking educators to teach a skill they do not have. Then there is the question of time: teaching cursive properly can consume roughly 70 minutes a week as children work to master the skill. How that fits into busy school days remains an open question. And not every kid is going to love learning cursive — just ask any teacher who has tried to get a room full of 7-year-olds excited about learning how to properly form a cursive capital G.

Mary Jean Tecce DeCarlo, Clinical Professor of Literacy Studies, Drexel University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. It was originally featured on Fortune.com.