My parents started dating back in the ’80s and for a while, they were long-distance. Since this was before our current era of smartphones and email, one of the ways they kept in touch was mail: My father would send cassette tapes to my mom with songs that reminded him of her, and they would both send letters reminiscing about the last time they were able to spend time together.
I love these letters because it’s a peek into my parents’ lives before me. I can feel the paper. I can see my mom’s beautiful penmanship. And from time to time, they also remind me that many of us would have to think long and hard to recall the last time we wrote something by hand.
According to Shawn Datchuk, a professor of special education at the University of Iowa and former director of the Iowa Reading Research Center, schoolchildren are writing less, too — and forget about cursive.
“The vast majority of states have adopted a national set of academic standards that specifically focus in on teaching handwriting during kindergarten and extends a little bit past the first grade,” he told Vox. “On average, teachers report spending as little as 10 minutes a week on teaching handwriting explicitly in kindergarten classrooms.”
This week, we explore how the ways we teach handwriting in the classroom have changed over time, and the impact it’s having on education as a whole. Plus: What are we missing when we don’t write by hand? We find out all of that and more on the latest episode of Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast.
Below is an excerpt of my conversation with Datchuk, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the full episode, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to askvox@vox.com or call 1-800-618-8545.
Ten minutes does not seem like a lot of time. Looking back on my own education, it felt like so much more. When did handwriting become less of a priority?
Changes really started to happen around 2010, and that was when the Common Core academic standards were adopted across the United States. In those standards there was a push for students to quickly move past handwriting and to start to adopt typing. The standards explicitly say students should make this transition to keyboarding right after the first and second grade.
Right? Then in those standards, it goes from print to keyboarding and completely drops cursive handwriting.
I remember being so excited for third grade in particular because where I went to school, that was when they started teaching cursive. Is it just not being taught at all anymore in K-12 schools?
Over the past several years, there’s been a swing back towards cursive. The latest count is approximately 26 states across the United States have passed some sort of legislation reinserting cursive into their statewide curriculum.
There is some compelling evidence that handwriting, whether it’s print or cursive, is closely related to reading development. Following the Covid-19 pandemic across the nation, we saw dips in reading scores. There is some thought by educational stakeholders and legislatures that perhaps if we focus on handwriting — in this case, cursive — maybe that will improve student reading scores.
I also hear consistently from parents, guardians, and teachers that they’re very interested in minimizing screen time. Then there’s also a camp of people out there who may have a strong patriotic inclination and they say that, well, the Declaration of Independence is written in cursive, so we should teach kids cursive because it looks so different than print. That way they can study the founding documents.
You’ve worked in education for a very long time, and I’m curious what you make of the changing trends in handwriting. Is pen and paper actually better compared to screens? Do we know if one is better than the other?
That’s a complicated question, but for younger kids who are learning how to read, there does seem to be some benefit in specifically using pencil and paper. There is such a close connection between reading and writing. When students learn how to handwrite, they’re basically committing to memory not only what a letter looks like, but also its name.
Let’s say you’re teaching a student, “This is a letter M,” and then they learn and commit to memory, “Oh, these are the different strokes or loops of M, and that also makes the mmm sound.” They’re committing that to memory, and so that allows them to draw on that for when they’re reading.
For older high school students, there also seems to be some logic in how distracting screens can be. I taught high school before. I also currently teach undergraduate students, and there’s a lot of different things that pop up on screens, whether it’s online shopping or checking messages or checking emails that can distract from learning important content.
Now, let me kind of flip over the other side. Screens are definitely here to stay, and I think pencils and paper are also here to stay. Artificial intelligence is here to stay. That also adds a whole other layer of complexity to this. For instructors and parents and guardians, perhaps the better question to ask is not so much which is better, but “How much time do my kids need with each one of these ways to communicate, whether it’s with a paper and pencil or whether it’s with a computer or tablet or smartphone?”
We talked a little bit about this evolution of technology. You have pen and paper, you have computers, you have smartphones, now we have AI. Is AI another reason to keep handwriting alive?
Unfortunately, I think so. With the rise of artificial intelligence, computer-based writing brings up difficult-to-determine questions on authorship. Lots of professors are struggling with questions on when we do a new assignment, how much of it is computer-generated versus how much of it is attributable to the hard work that students have done.
I definitely see a shift back to the blue books. I know that the [University of] Iowa bookstore here has started stocking blue books on their shelves for the first time since I’ve been here, and I’ve been here over a decade.
What do you think students lose if they stop writing by hand regularly?
Besides the academic benefits that I discussed earlier, I do think that one of the strongest reasons that I can think of to engage in handwriting is what we consider a moral reason: Handwriting is so deeply personal to all of us. I think that’s one of the reasons why a handwritten note resonates so emotionally with us as humans.
For instance, when my mom had a recent birthday, I sent her a handwritten card. On Mother’s Day, my sons and I wrote little notes and my 4-year-old drew a picture for my wife. And then, I’m in my mid-forties. One of the rites of passage of being a middle-aged person now [is that] my wife and I went through the process of getting a living will put together. Last night I was making handwritten notes on the living will because I knew that it was something that I really needed to think through carefully and deliberately.
What we kind of see with even lots of college-age students is that when you engage in writing with a pen or pencil, you tend to synthesize or think more deeply about that information than when you’re just typing.
