Cursive comeback? Minnesota bill would require script handwriting lessons in schools

Among the staff at Topgolf, 11th-grader Augustine Fredericks has a rare and coveted skill.

When a customer orders a celebratory dessert, the teenager is often summoned to pipe a fancy “happy birthday” message in chocolate across the plate.

The reason he’s the go-to guy for the job? He’s the only one there who can write in cursive — a skill he perfected under the tutelage of nuns at St. Anne’s Academy in White Bear Lake.

The school is one of the few to champion script handwriting, though more of Minnesota’s schools could soon join a revival of what some lawmakers and educators worry is a lost art.

A proposed bill at the Legislature would require the state to teach elementary students to read and write cursive, reversing a shift that began more than 15 years ago, when the state adopted Common Core standards for English instruction, which did not include cursive lessons. That means whole swaths of Minnesota’s Gen Zers and younger students never received formal education on how to read or write in cursive.

In the last decade, several states have passed legislation supporting cursive instruction, and more than half — including Iowa, as of 2024 — now have such laws.

Advocates say learning cursive can support brain development, fine motor skills and hand-eye coordination. And both supporters and opponents agree that the topic taps into broader and increasingly politicized debates over back-to-basics teaching and how much classroom time should be shaped by screens vs. traditional skills.

Sen. Ann Rest of New Hope introduced the bill this session, modeled after similar legislation she proposed in 2019, when the now 83-year-old DFL state senator and former English teacher realized her teenage grandson couldn’t read the note she’d scrawled in a birthday card. Still, she’s quick to clarify that the push is more practical than simply nostalgic.

Students should be able to read historical documents like the Declaration of Independence, which was written when beautiful penmanship was “the mark of an educated person,” Rest said.

Plus, Rest added, reading cursive is a human skill — artificial intelligence can’t always reliably decipher cursive — and one that still has practical uses. The National Archives, for example, is partnering with the National Park Service to recruit volunteers who can read cursive to help transcribe Revolutionary War pension files ahead of the nation’s 250th anniversary.

Other state senators wondered about the cost of a cursive mandate and whether teachers would have time to squeeze it into curriculum already packed with requirements.

“I do think there is whole segments of our education system where we have traded ease for something that’s really important,” Sen. Erin Maye Quade, DFL-Apple Valley, said in a committee hearing about the bill.

If the legislation, which was laid over for possible inclusion in an omnibus bill, passed, Rest said it may require a shift in instructing future educators, too, since many of them may have never learned cursive.

“We may have to first teach the teachers,” Rest said.

There is no formal curriculum for teaching handwriting or cursive in teacher preparation programs at the University of Minnesota, said Cynthia Zwicky, a senior lecturer in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the U’s College of Education and Human Development.

She said many students entering teacher colleges today likely didn’t learn cursive unless they attended schools that never moved away from it, often Montessori programs and Catholic schools.

Some public schools and certain teachers may also offer cursive, though it’s not widely tracked. Kenwood Elementary School in Minneapolis, for example, taught cursive to one grade for a couple of years in 2022 before discontinuing it in part because it’s not in state curriculum standards.

Zwicky has noticed her own students rarely take notes by hand, though research suggests doing so — not necessarily in cursive — may help with information processing and memory.

“I feel that losing this daily handwriting that we did as children, whether it’s cursive or printing, just writing with your hand, is shedding some neurons or some pathways that we didn’t know were essential to other things,” she said.

Cursive has largely fallen off the curriculum in teacher training because schools are focused on other demands, Zwicky said. But she argues it could be one way to slow students down, engage the brain differently and help them better absorb what they’re learning.

While the University of St. Thomas still instructs its future educators on how to teach cursive alongside print handwriting, “we don’t spend much time on it,” said Liz Fogarty, an assistant professor of education in the School of Education.

“There’s not a lot of evidence that says that students need this for the sake of learning,” she said, adding that while some value it for nostalgia or reading historical documents, “one of the tricky parts of education and being an educator is predicting the skills that students will need in their future. It can be a really difficult gamble.”

Fogarty remembers working for a principal that wanted her to teach an hour of cursive every day. Adding cursive should be a more nuanced decision that she believes should be left to individual educators who know their students.

“I don’t put this in the pile of things that students most need,” she said.

At St. Anne’s Academy, students like Fredericks pride themselves on their penmanship. Cursive instruction starts in second grade at the Catholic school of 75 students. The focus is a part of the school’s mission to “think clearly, write carefully, and approach their studies with discipline and purpose.”

When the school’s teachers, who are nuns who wear full habits, are out in the community, Sister Pauline Marie said one of the first questions is: “Do you still teach cursive?”

“It always gets people remembering their own experience learning it,” she said.

Several St. Anne’s students have won the Zaner-Bloser National Handwriting Contest, which draws tens of thousands of entries and requires participants to write, “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” In 2024, St. Anne student Zita Miller and Mary Kieffer were among the winners.

Miller, who was named a grand national champion in the 2024 competition, remembers being excited to reach second grade and start learning the “new language” her friends at other schools didn’t know. Kieffer said she’s still perfecting her cursive “W” and “R,” inspired by the sisters’ handwriting.

“I think it’s about doing your best in all the little things and developing that skill you’ll have for the rest of your life,” she said.

On a recent afternoon, second-graders traced the word “keep” in cursive, first sketching the letters in the air with sweeping arm motions. Then, gripping No. 2 pencils, they leaned over tilted workbooks, angling each stroke to get the slant just right.

“I know it’s becoming a bit of a lost art,” Sister Mary Xavier said. “But we don’t want to set aside our own language.”

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