Has Cursive Gone Way of Encyclopedia Research in Primary Education?

It explained how Crawford's daughter handed her a hand-written thank-you letter to read because she couldn't understand what it said.

"It’s an increasingly common phenomenon, accelerated by the fact that the new Common Core educational standards do not include cursive instruction. This, however, was the first time I realized that my children will probably be incapable of reading something in cursive," Crawford wrote.

Turns out, nearly every U.S. state, including Connecticut, save for California, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Massachusetts, North Carolina and Utah, have stopped requiring grade-schoolers learn to write in cursive. 

Here in our Middletown elementary, cursive isn't routinely taught. A number of years ago when my now 16-year-old was asked to sign a statement at school, I watched him print his first and last names in block letters.

I remember feeling sad and a little bit embarrassed, but should I have been?

Last year, when my then fourth-grader wanted to learn how to write in script, his teacher sent home some standard alphabet sheets for him to practice on.

Both his parents are journalists and somehow the evidence of our frantic note-taking filling a notebook looks to him like an exotic language that requires a complicated rubric to decipher.

Looks like the only time it's necessary to sign one's name now is on a check. But who does that when there's an electronic alternative?

When I posed the question on Facebook, "Parents: What has happened to students learning to write in cursive and other lessons lost with common core?" A number of people responded. Here's what they said:

Ann: Must learn cursive writing! It's penmanship. Are you going to have young adults print their names on documents because they can't write?

Sandra: A signature is not "printing" your name! Geezzzz!

Shelly: It's up to parents to teach our children
Kellie: What she said, I've been teaching them myself. I bought a workbook on Amazon, piece of cake.

李業舲: It wasn't too long ago that I took my SATs and people weren't sure how to sign their names. "Print your names and connect the letters at the bottom with a line" said the proctors.

Gregory: Some things are just gonna die out, most adults can't use cursive properly anyway. Let's teach kids important stuff from now on! Yeah, go get em!

Patrick: It's a lost medium

Marcia: Keep cursive, for God's sake. Most of us ditch the capital G and Q for more print-like versions, but if you want to be able to research old manuscripts, et al, it's good to know, and better for signatures and letters

Nettie: I always demanded cursive be taught. I believe there is a hand-mind connection.

Quatina: I heard the schools were not teaching cursive anymore... but to my surprise, my third-grader came home with cursive homework

Mike: I was taught cursive in elementary school and that is what they preferred us to use on tests and homework. Then I got to high school and they told us NOT to write in cursive and that they'd prefer that we used print. So between elementary school making us use cursive and high school making us use print, my writing is now a mishmash of the two.

I think the best reason for teaching kids cursive is it makes you able to write a lot faster, which is a very important skill to have in high school and college when you are taking notes. You'll need to write as fast as possible in notebooks during lectures so you don't miss anything.

Unless of course everybody is typing their notes on a laptop in the classroom which is even faster than writing in cursive. So maybe cursive isn't necessary after all?

Do you think cursive should still be taught in elementary schools or is it a no longer useful — like hand-written notes, pay phones, landlines and the pogo stick? Tell us in the comments below.