Disaster America's fight to save handwriting from extinction as IQs begin to fall for first time ever - and teachers warn some 20-year-olds can't sign checks anymore

  • Americans reported they hadn't written a note or personal letter in five years
  • People are having a hard time reading their own and others' handwriting
  • Studies show writing can increase the brain's cognitive abilities

Several US states are trying to prevent handwriting from going extinct as classrooms increasingly swap pen and paper for tablets and computers.

The US government removed the skill from the core curriculum in 2010 due to claims it was time consuming and would not be useful in the age of technology which meant schools could instead focus on typing classes.

Handwriting is considered a fine motor skill that stimulates and challenges the brain, but with schools turning to technology instead, some teachers are complaining students can barely hold a pencil but can swipe and double-click on their devices.

Students with learning disabilities like dysgraphia - when children can read but have trouble writing letters - can also be affected because methods of overcoming the disability requires them to practice writing by hand.

Previous studies have revealed that IQ scores have dropped for the first time in a century and indicated that technology could be to blame.

Teachers, parents and experts who DailyMail.com spoke to said they were seeing kids and young adults who don't know how to sign their name or read cursive.

Experts have urged schools to re-introduce cursive into the curriculum, citing the need to understand historical documents. Pictured: Cursive written before it was removed from the common core standard in 2010

New legislative bills have been passed in states like California and New York requiring students aged six to 12 years old to learn cursive writing, but others are still advancing in state legislature while some are still hesitant to revert back including Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada.

'I wish [students] would learn how to write in cursive,' Tracy Bendish, an ABA autism therapist for Jefferson Public Schools told DailyMail.com.

'But it is like the telephone on the wall,' she said. 'Less and less used and then not there anymore.'

There is a big educational disparity between schools that readily have access to gadgets versus those that don't, causing what's called the digital divide.

Students who have better access to technology will have better educational success than those who don't, which is particularly concerning as more teachers turn to technology in their courses.

'The digital divide has affected individual students in the same school as well as groups of students across districts, lowering the academic outcomes of low-income, underserved students and districts,' according to American University.

Last year, researchers at the University of Oregon and Northwestern reported that IQ scores had dropped because technology shortens attention spans and decreases the need to think deeply.

Experts have been urging governments and school administrators to bring handwriting back to schools, citing sixth graders who have trouble holding a pencil but can use digital devices with ease.

Dr. Lori Koerner, the assistant superintendent for the Riverhead Central School District in New York, told DailyMail.com that it is essential for elementary and middle schoolers to be taught cursive.

'Though technology has its benefits, children need to be able to read cursive in the event a document is presented to them along their journey.

'They most certainly, at the very least, need to know how to sign their name,' Koerner said.

'I have encountered too many secondary students and employment candidates who cannot sign documents relative to their onboarding process.'

Teachers and coworkers continue to struggle with ineligible handwriting, and a 2021 survey conducted by OnePoll on behalf of Bic USA Inc. found that 45 percent of Americans struggle to read their own handwriting while a shocking 70 percent reported that they have trouble reading notes or reports from their coworkers.

Some people have expressed similar views, saying that signing important documents will become a stressful practice without the ability to write cursive.

'My 20 year-old-granddaughter struggles to sign a check,' said Kimberly Jacovino of Monroe, Connecticut.

'It is very important and should be brought back to all schools,' she added.

In the wake of turning to keyboarding instead of writing by hand, educators found students' IQ levels are shrinking and placed the blame on technology in the classroom, Psychology Today reported.

Hetty Roessingh, a professor emerita of education at the University of Calgary echoed this sentiment, saying that five-year-olds are not meeting academic benchmarks because of the accessibility of digital devices.

Roessingh has long advocated for schools to push handwriting and cursive on children because it is an important tool to engage the hand-brain complex and circuitry that induces memory and retrieving information that typing simply doesn't do.

A new study published in February by researchers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) found that handwriting is linked to increased cognitive brain function, motor skills and memory.

'It is important to realize that the brain follows the principle of 'use it or lose it,' said Audrey van der Meer, the study's lead author and neuropsychology professor at the NTNU.

'When writing by hand, most of the brain is active,' she continued.

'This requires the brain to communicate between its active parts which, in turn, puts the brain in a state that helps both children and adults learn more and remember better,' van der Meer said.

Schools stopped teaching cursive in 2010 when most US states adopted what's called Common Core State Standards, which set benchmarks for reading and math but didn't include cursive as part of the recommended curriculum.

At the time, critics said teaching efforts would be better spent on developing new skills like coding and keyboarding while others called the writing style 'old fashioned.'

When dropping cursive from common core, lawmakers argued that cursive was time-consuming and wouldn't be as useful as other skills like typing, that students would need at they moved on to junior and high school,' a then-spokesperson for Georgia Department of Education told ABC News at the time.

Cursive also wasn't on the tests that ranked schools under the No Child Left Behind Law which was put in place by the Bush Administration in 2002 and ended in 2015.

Schools would typically gear their learning curriculum around what was required under the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) which set benchmarks for academic performance that all schools had to meet.

If they continuously failed to meet the NCLB standards, the state had the right to change the school's leadership team or even close the school.

Forty-one states adopted the common core curriculum and while individually they were able to choose to teach cursive, California and Massachusetts were among the few states to opt in.

Roughly six years later, 14 states reintroduced the writing style into all classes, and by 2019, that number grew to 20 states.

Democratic assemblywoman Sharon Quirk-Silva introduced a bill in California last year, citing the need for students to not only be able to write in cursive but to read it as well.

The California bill will go into effect for the upcoming 2024-2025 school year but similar bills are still pending in states like Kentucky where, if it's passed, would be implemented in the 2025-2026 academic year.

The push is also in response to the ever-increasing artificial intelligence technology, which Quirk-Silva believed will cause teachers to return to handwritten essay exams necessitating students' ability to write in cursive because it is faster than print.

If handwriting becomes extinct, it would be a major loss to understanding history or connecting with our past, Roessingh said.

'It is about the embodied cognition and the circuitry behind personal messages that are beneficial both for the person who wrote it and the person who read it,' she said.

Handwriting, particularly cursive, presents the idea of what's called embodied cognition, meaning it acts as a switch to lock in your memory.

This makes it increasingly important for kids to write by hand and learn cursive because they are 'essentially tactile and sensory beings who take in the world through engagement,' Roessingh explained.

More than that, a piece of history could be lost to younger generations who aren't taught to read and write cursive, leaving them unable to read major historical documents like the diary of Anne Franke, the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

Chelsea Hayes, a Maryland mom, said regardless of what schools decide, she plans on making sure her three-year-old daughter knows how to write in cursive when she gets older.

'I do think it's important. Not just for historical purposes, but also just as a skill. I think it's almost like learning another language,' Hayes said.

'You don't teach kids art or music because of history, though I guess there's a historical component you can put in there.

'It's just another skill I think she should have. If she never uses it, oh well. If she does, great.'

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Cursive, maps, and clocks. It always gets me thinking that the real idea should be that we need 'Analogue lessons'. It seems to do the mind good when you have to engage in things non-digitally especially at a younger age. Plus, we need to be able to do things when the internet or power isn't around.
Honestly I consider topigraphical map reading and the ability to use/read a sundial survival skills more than anything else. Sometimes you don't have cell signal, after all.

Cursive was made obsolete as soon as the typewriter was invented. There is no case where it is superior to legible printed letters outside of calligraphy, which is used for decoration, not communication.

If you use cursive for anything other than calligraphy you're a doctor who should fucking stop before he kills someone.
 
The other day I was asked by my neighbors if I could read something in cursive because they had purchased a old journal. Their only one generation removed from me.
 
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I don't really see much use in analogue clocks and AM/PM.

I agree, but only with the supplication that people who skip out on it can read 24-hour time at a glance. I feel that an absolutely critical skill in current year for global communication, scheduling, transport, et cetera.

Still, the ability to read an analogue clock is certainly a nice-to-have that a willing parent (!!) could teach and test on in about 30 minutes.
 
Schools went hard on not only refusing to teach cursive but also punishing children who used the skill in the classroom back in the early 2010s. I remember relatives bitching about 2 things about their school aged children during that time: common core and lack of cursive classes.
 
Analogue clocks' big problem is that there is often no clean indicator of which arm is hours, which is minutes.
And most need electricity too.

Basically, you don't need to have these outdated tools to measure IQ, which is the real issue here.
What? The short arm is hour and the long one is minute. Is that not universal?
 
I'm happy to report my Russian cursive is still rather good. Imagine not being able to write in cursive in at least one language.
 
What? The short arm is hour and the long one is minute. Is that not universal?
Usually the difference between length is not that noticable, or at least requires you to study the piece to figure out, unless the two are very close together. Whoever came up with that was a lazy retard. One should have had a symbol on top, like a bell, the other without. I think I recall some custom old timey mechanical clocks with different bars, but even than that's only useful for one household who knews what symbol is which. It is just a hassle.
 
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There is definitely a cognitive relationship between memory and writing-probably something to do with more active use of various brain functions.

I definitely think hand writing should be kept and encouraged, and this coming from someone whose handwriting is so bad a professor joked it was an alien language once.
 
There is definitely a cognitive relationship between memory and writing-probably something to do with more active use of various brain functions.
I noticed this.
Cursive was my primary mode of writing until I took AP math and sciences in high school.
I noticed printing, while slower, helped me commit things to memory (probably because D'Nealian was the first handwriting taught when I was growing up) .
 
Ironically language models might save handwriting in schools. A teacher told me that students using AI to write their essays for them is so endemic that they've had to make the kids write every assignment in-class to prevent this form of cheating. Making them handwrite it would also discourage it, since the cheater would have to transcribe rather than copy-paste.
 
For now.
There's intense lawfare looking for a precedent that will allow it coming out of New England.
That's why you use Latin commands instead. My pug is just a legionnaire, officer. Please ignore the obnoxious shrieking. He's singing along to some black metal.
 
There is definitely a cognitive relationship between memory and writing-probably something to do with more active use of various brain functions.

I definitely think hand writing should be kept and encouraged, and this coming from someone whose handwriting is so bad a professor joked it was an alien language once.
I do think there's something to this. When I was in school, my trick to memorizing anything was to write it down repeatedly, looking at the source less and less as every time.

With that I could memorize anything they threw at us in an afternoon.
 
Quite frankly, I would rather they focus on teaching kids not to write like niggers and use basic correct grammar. Now, I'm not talking about crap like "dangling participles" or other such nonsense. I mean basics that many poorly educated swine, even on this very website, in this very thread, fail to do correctly. Things like using the wrong "there"/"their"/"they're" or "your"/"you're" or (the one that irritates me the most) "of" instead of "have" (such as "would of" instead of "would have"/"would've").

And most of all I really wish they'd teach them not to use "yall" in their writing. YOU WILL NEVER BE A NIGGER, JIMMY!
 
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