On a recent Tuesday night, I attended the parents’ open house at my daughters’ school, a Taft-era brick building in New Haven, Connecticut, which serves four hundred and fifty children, in grades kindergarten through eighth. I have three daughters there, so I had to make the rounds to each of their homerooms. When I got to my third grader’s classroom, I sat at her desk and noticed, taped to the top of the desk’s writing surface, a laminated strip of paper displaying the multiplication tables up to 9×9, the alphabet in print, and, with little arrows showing the strokes needed to make the letters, the alphabet in cursive.
The laminated papers with cursive-writing instructions, taped to every one of the tyke-size school desks with the sweeping attached arms, were sad and beautiful at once, in the special way of obsolete educational technology, like the Apple IIe, or the No. 2 pencil itself. For me, a writer of strong fuddy-duddy credentials, the sad dramatic irony really was too much. You see, cursive isn’t being taught in my daughters’ school anymore, and hasn’t been for at least six years, as long as I’ve had children in the public schools. Who would tell the cursive that it was no longer needed?
I already had cursive on my mind, because summer was just barely over, and for the third year in a row I had written letters, by hand, to my eldest daughter, Rebekah, at sleepaway camp. Handwriting was my own little form of protest, because at our daughter’s camp most parents write by e-mail. The camp is a back-in-time place, set on ninety unimproved rural acres in Western Massachusetts, with no televisions or computers for the campers, and a stern promise to confiscate mobile phones. But the camp offers an accommodation to the Internet age: if parents wish to send letters by e-mail, the counsellors will print them out and deliver them to the children in their bunks.
Although my wife takes advantage of this e-mail room service, zipping daily missives from her laptop at our kitchen island, I refuse. It doesn’t seem right. I learned early in life to love camp mail, written longhand. I went to three different overnight camps, and hated each one more than the last, but even though camp and I didn’t get along—or, rather, because camp and I didn’t get along—I loved getting mail. The sight of my father’s or mother’s script on a small white envelope was what I anticipated right until mail call, after lunch, and what kept me going for the long afternoon hours afterward. I liked letters on which their handwriting was rushed and slightly illegible, because if I had trouble deciphering the handwriting the letter lasted longer. When my grandmother wrote, I had difficulty deciphering her elegant, Palmer Method hand, but I enjoyed the antique nature of the challenge. It felt as if I were playing tennis with a wooden racquet.
I’ll confess that, when I sat down to write these letters for camp, the act of writing wasn’t quite as pleasurable as its contemplation. I write so seldom by hand anymore that my stamina is low. By the time that I had covered two sides of a small piece of stationery, my letters tended to get sloppier, and my right hand was cramping. I usually had to take a short recovery break before I addressed the envelope. But then I rebounded: stamped the letter with gusto (wishing, for old time’s sake, that stamps still required a lick), leashed up the dog, and walked to the mailbox down the street, a routine that always improved my spirits. Over the summers, I became proud of this little tradition, these thrice-weekly letters written in cursive. Surely, Rebekah, away at camp and perhaps more homesick than she let on, could see how much I cared. The love was in the downstrokes and curlicues!
Or so I thought, until midsummer, when it was pointed out to me, by which friend I now forget, that Rebekah, unfamiliar with decoding cursive, might not be able to read these letters I was sending. I forged ahead, reminding myself of the superiority of handwriting to my wife’s e-mailing, which lacked the dignity of hard labor. Then, a day or two after Rebekah came home from camp, I asked her, “By the way, are you able to read my writing?” She thought about it, and her reply, when it came, was comforting. “Mostly,” she said. “By this summer, I got pretty good at it. Sometimes I had to get a counsellor to help me.”
None of this should bother me. My children know how to print their letters. And they type frighteningly well. Still, I can’t escape the conviction that cursive—writing it and knowing how to read it—represents some universal value. I’m not the only one who thinks so. Every year, there are worried articles about the decline of cursive and its omission from school curricula. And there’s a backlash, one that I secretly cheer for. When I read that Washington state is now considering Senate Bill 6469, “an act related to requiring that cursive writing be taught in common schools,” I gave a little fist pump in the air.
This is sheer nonsense, of course. My preference is just one bit of residual snobbery in a long tradition of residual snobbery. There have been cursive scripts, created for speedier writing, at least since the Egyptian hand that the Greeks called “demotic,” according to Anne Trubek, author of the spritely new book “The History and Uncertain Future of Handwriting.” In the fourth and fifth centuries, Augustine used “half-uncial,” the first script to include lowercase letters. Different national scripts proliferated over the centuries. The Declaration of Independence is written in a style known as round hand, one of many handwriting vernaculars that we’d recognize from Puritan and Colonial documents. From the beginning, people have attached judgments to different scripts, and people’s proficiency in them. Because handwriting was labor, the work of monks or hired scribes, it used to be something that the status-conscious made sure not to do too well. “The more educated and illustrious you were,” Trubek writes, of eighteenth-century France, “the worse your handwriting was supposed to be.”
Under the long shadow of the Puritans, handwriting in American was put in the service of moralism. After an early life devoted to alcohol, Platt Rogers Spencer, born in 1810, discovered the vice of temperance. He moved on to better causes, like abolitionism and universal education, before discovering his real calling: penmanship. To promote Spencerian script—we know it from the swirly “Coca-Cola” on bottles and cans—he franchised schools and sold his own brand of books and pens. He believed that good penmanship is more than ink on paper. Rather, it “refines our tastes” and “makes us better men.” Spencer’s greatest successor, the nineteenth-century handwriting pedagogue A. N. Palmer—whose technique, familiar to me from all my grandparents’ correspondence, was ubiquitous in schools until the nineteen-fifties—also believed that there was an ethical component to his work. “Penmanship training ranks among the most valuable aids in reforming ‘bad’ children,” he wrote. (He also believed that left-handed children were devious.)
With handwriting elevated to the realm of the virtues, every technology that made writing easier had to be treated with contempt. Bards worried that handwriting would destroy our memories (it did), and scribes loathed the printing press for economic reasons, but handwriting enthusiasts were suspicious of what the typewriter would do to our souls. In 1938, a writer in the Times fretted that “the universal typewriter may swallow all.”
And, of course, keyboarding has swallowed my handwriting whole. Aside from letters in the summer, I do two things by hand: correct my students’ papers, and add items to our weekly food-shopping list. But when I do use my cursive, however seldom, it’s with a small rush of good feelings. Cursive, to me, is those letters at camp, and, later, letters from my parents at college. And my daughters won’t escape it so easily. Even after their school trades in those desks for newer models, I will keep using cursive in any letters I write to them. Their camp director confirmed my sense that I was a rare bird. “I think the vast majority of our parents use this,” he told me, of the camp’s e-mail system. But, like any father, I’ll keep telling myself that everything I say matters to my children, enough to decipher my words, however strangely written.
