Editorial of April 16, 2026
Virtual Volunteers and Citizen Archivists, Are You There?
Among our many distinguishing factors is the ability to communicate with each other, through speech, petroglyphs and the written word. Cursive handwriting, also known as joined-up writing, or script, and arguably the first use of the written word for all of mankind, is defined as any style of penmanship in which characters are written joined in a flowing manner, enabling faster, more efficient, writing without lifting the pen (or earlier, the quill). Formal cursive consists of joined letters; casual cursive is a combination of joined letters and pen lifts. It was developed by the Greeks and Romans (the term “cursive” is derived from the Latin currere, meaning to run) and it was flourishing in Old English as well as Medieval Latin before the Norman Conquest in the 11th century, becoming widely used for both personal correspondence and official documents from early in the 16th century. Needless to say, in the United States all of the historical documents relating to the beginning of the country are written in cursive English.
Sadly, in this century cursive handwriting has been on a disappearing track. Although in a 2007 national survey of 200 teachers of first through third grades 90 percent said their schools required the teaching of cursive handwriting, a survey the following year found only 12 percent of elementary teachers had taken a course on how to teach it. In 2010 the Federal government removed it from the Common Core Standards for students in K through 12. Although school curricula are set at the state level, 41 states, including our own New York, dropped the teaching of cursive writing from their classrooms, prioritizing instead the development of digital skills. That left a good number of young people very comfortable with word processors, computers, keyboards, and smartphones, but seriously unable to read or write letters, papers, documents—and the signatures of influential people—written in any form of cursive handwriting. Grandparents have started sending block-printed birthday cards to their grandchildren.
Research has shown that cursive handwriting enhances brain development, increasing neural pathway activation, memory recall, and fine motor skills, improves overall cognitive growth and confidence, and aids students in a variety of academic pursuits. Its fluidity allows smoother, faster and more efficient writing, releasing the student’s attention to concentrate on content.
But wait. Cursive is coming back. Today, more than 25 states (sadly, not our own New York) require once again that cursive handwriting be taught in their elementary schools.
Last fall, in a letter to “The Freeman’s Journal,” Cooperstown native Kevin Grady asked if Cooperstown Central School would reconsider teaching cursive handwriting to its elementary-school students. That is a substantially good request, but as of now it has not come to fruition. We can only hope.
As we wait, we might consider the outreach of the Library of Congress, whose By the People program, launched in 2018, asks all of us (that is, all of us who can understand cursive handwriting) to become a Virtual Volunteer and help transcribe and review the many millions of handwritten historical documents in its collections. The National Archives, too, has a volunteer transcriber program whose Citizen Archivists work on documents dating from the Revolutionary War to the present. It would be a terrible thing for history if, down the road, no one volunteered to transcribe, and no one was taught to read cursive.
Perhaps, with the new mandates that bring cursive instruction back to our third-graders, we can outgrow our fear of losing our ability to read these pages. Perhaps Cooperstown Central School and other Otsego County school districts will help.
