Letter from Kevin Grady

No Cursive? What’s Up?

Recently I came across a paper I wrote 60 years ago, in 1965, when I was a freshman at Cooperstown Central School. The English teacher required every ninth-grader to write an autobiography. I thought to myself, this is going to be great. I’ll share it with my kids and grandkids so they can see what I was thinking about then. Both my kids could read it, but when I asked my grandkids their thoughts about it, they said they couldn’t read it. It is in cursive. I was stunned!

I have been out of the educational loop for a long time. In one generation, the ability to read cursive has disappeared. My English teacher’s assignment wasn’t really about the content, it was about seeing how capable we were at penmanship, creating sentences and paragraphs, capitalization, spelling, and punctuation.

I learned how to write cursive in elementary school and took typing in high school. I know every child uses a tablet now and that’s fine, but it seems one sided, i.e., short sighted.

So, I started doing a little research about it. Scientists have tested and basically proven that learning cursive is good for a child’s brain function, motor skills, hand-eye coordination, improving memory, spelling skill, and it may even help students with dyslexia. Since 2018, five states have joined the 18 that require cursive learning. The other 27 states do not demand cursive teaching. New York State is one of the latter. Any school district can choose to teach it if they want to. I always thought the NYS public school system was one of the best in the country. I’m not so sure any more.

How does a kid sign his name, with block letters?! Think about people whose parents have passed on, going through their things and finding a bundle of love letters, or reading V-Mail to and from soldiers in World War II. Visiting the Rotunda in Washington, D.C. they will be unable to read the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights or the United States Constitution. There might be a bright side to this, but I don’t believe it. The United States National Archives is trying to hire people who can read cursive to transcribe 250-plus years of federal records.

I have to admit it, I’ve become an old fogey. Out of touch for sure, and guilty as charged. They don’t diagram sentences anymore; nouns, pronouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives. I have burned in my brain, “Conjunction Junction, what’s your function?” from my kids watching “Schoolhouse Rock” on PBS. I’m not sure if a course called civics is still taught.

All that being said, I want to thank the school board for dedicating their free time and volunteering to take on a difficult job. All the staff at our schools deserve our respect and appreciation for taking on a very important job—educating our children. God bless you all.

Respectfully, I’m climbing down off my soapbox now.

Kevin Grady
Cooperstown