Handwriting fades, but the losses are real

handwriting in – From the Common Core-era push toward keyboarding to a recent swing back in some states, experts say handwriting—print and cursive—can shape how children learn to read, focus, and even understand writing as personal. As AI complicates authorship, some educators

A handwritten note can still land with a kind of weight that typing often doesn’t. But across U.S. classrooms, the habit of picking up a pen has been steadily squeezed—first by standards that encouraged students to move on quickly, and later by a renewed effort to bring cursive back.

Shawn Datchuk. a professor of special education at the University of Iowa and former director of the Iowa Reading Research Center. traces a major shift to the early 2010s. “Changes really started to happen around 2010. ” he said. pointing to the adoption of the Common Core academic standards across the United States. In those standards, there was a push for students to quickly move past handwriting and begin adopting typing. The standards “explicitly say students should make this transition to keyboarding right after the first and second grade,” Datchuk said. “Right?. Then in those standards, it goes from print to keyboarding and completely drops cursive handwriting.”.

For many families, the change is harder to spot at first than it is to feel later. Datchuk argues that school time spent on handwriting is now dramatically limited. “The vast majority of states have adopted a national set of academic standards that specifically focus in on teaching handwriting during kindergarten and extends a little bit past the first grade. ” he said. adding that teachers report spending “as little as 10 minutes a week on teaching handwriting explicitly in kindergarten classrooms.”.

Yet even as handwriting time shrank, the conversation never stopped. Over the past several years, there has been a swing back toward cursive. Datchuk said the latest count is approximately 26 states across the United States that have passed some sort of legislation reinserting cursive into their statewide curriculum.

Parents and educators cite several reasons for that push—some practical, some emotional, some tied to identity. Datchuk said there is “some compelling evidence” that handwriting—whether print or cursive—is closely related to reading development. After the Covid-19 pandemic. the country saw dips in reading scores. and there has been discussion among educational stakeholders and legislatures that focusing on handwriting. in this case cursive. might help improve students’ reading.

Other concerns sound different, but they run alongside the reading argument. Datchuk said he hears consistently from parents, guardians, and teachers who are interested in minimizing screen time. He also described a camp of people with a patriotic inclination who say cursive should be taught because it appears in the Declaration of Independence.

The debate often turns into a simple question—paper or screens. But Datchuk says it isn’t that clean. “That’s a complicated question. ” he said. though he added that for younger kids learning how to read. there does seem to be benefit in pencil and paper. He described the close connection between reading and writing. saying that when students learn to handwrite. they commit to memory “not only what a letter looks like. but also its name.”.

He gave a basic example of how that memory builds: when a student is taught, “This is a letter M,” the child learns the strokes or loops of M and how that connects to the “mmm” sound. The result, he said, is that students can draw on what they’ve practiced when they later read.

For older students, he said there’s a different kind of logic. He described having taught high school and currently teaching undergraduate students. and said screens bring “a lot of different things that pop up. ” from online shopping to checking messages and emails—distractions that can pull attention away from learning important content.

Still, Datchuk doesn’t treat screens as a passing fad. “Screens are definitely here to stay. ” he said. and he also believes “pencils and paper are also here to stay.” The future. he argued. is not a choice between two tools. but a question of balance: “The better question to ask is not so much which is better. but ‘How much time do my kids need with each one of these ways to communicate. whether it’s with a paper and pencil or whether it’s with a computer or tablet or smartphone?’”.

The emergence of artificial intelligence adds a new pressure point. Datchuk said he thinks AI strengthens the case for keeping handwriting alive. in part because of the uncertain questions that come with computer-based writing. He described the difficulty of determining authorship—what portion of a new assignment is computer-generated and how much reflects students’ own work.

One small sign of that renewed focus is already showing up in his environment. Datchuk said he has noticed a shift back to blue books and that the Iowa bookstore has started stocking blue books on their shelves “for the first time since I’ve been here,” adding that he has been there “over a decade.”

But the consequences of handwriting disappearing aren’t only academic, Datchuk said. He pointed to a moral reason—a deeply personal one. “Handwriting is so deeply personal to all of us,” he said. He described how that personal quality helps explain why a handwritten note resonates emotionally.

He brought the idea home with details from his own life: when his mother had a recent birthday. he sent her a handwritten card. On Mother’s Day, his sons and he wrote little notes and his 4-year-old drew a picture for his wife. And then there was the private. adult task of planning—he said he and his wife were putting together a living will. and “last night I was making handwritten notes on the living will because I knew that it was something that I really needed to think through carefully and deliberately.”.

What students lose, he said, isn’t just the mechanics of writing. Even among college-age students, he said, pen-and-pencil work tends to push people to synthesize and think more deeply than typing alone.

In other words, the handwriting debate isn’t simply about nostalgia for cursive loops. It’s about what the act of writing by hand trains in the mind—and what it signals when words are meant to be more than pixels on a screen.

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