Recently, my 8-year-old son received a birthday card from his grandmother. He opened the card, looked at it and said, “I can’t read cursive yet.” Then he handed it to me to read. If you have a child ...

A pair of bills filed for the 2026 Legislative Session would mandate students from second to fifth grade to learn how to write and read in cursive.

On October 13, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law a bill making cursive handwriting instruction mandatory in 1st through 6th grades. The legislation passed this year, but it could have just ...

(THE CONVERSATION) Recently, my 8-year-old son received a birthday card from his grandmother. He opened the card, looked at it and said, “I can’t read cursive yet.” Then he handed it to me to read. If ...

(The Conversation) – Recently, my 8-year-old son received a birthday card from his grandmother. He opened the card, looked at it and said, “I can’t read cursive yet.” Then he handed it to me to read.

Shawn Datchuk is an associate professor of special education at the University of Iowa. This essay from The Conversation is republished under a Creative Commons license. Recently, my 8-year-old son ...

Here’s a list of things I never learned between kindergarten and eighth grade: the modern history and geography of any country outside of North America and Europe; a foreign language; anything related ...

Nearly 40 years later, the admonishments of my second-grade teacher at Thomas Jefferson Elementary in Anaheim still ring in my ears. “Messy! Messy!” I was a precocious 8-year-old, placed in a ...

To the editor: As a 77-year-old who won my school’s penmanship competition in fourth grade, I’m pretty happy that California kids will be learning cursive handwriting. (“Learning cursive in school, ...

To the editor: Though Tamara Plakins Thornton claims that cursive handwriting is no longer necessary, she misses some key benefits about it. First, cursive is faster. In situations that require speed, ...