With SB 129, Sen. Leising continues with her quest to dictate that all schools throughout the land teach cursive to their students, regardless of whether educators making those decisions regard cursive instruction as the best use of limited teaching time. Last year, HB 1420 passed with a bit of fluff indicating that schools are permitted to offer cursive instruction (which has always been the case). She had successfully injected mandatory cursive into the version of the House bill that passed the Senate, but that was stripped out in conference in favor of the voluntary language.
Before anyone gets going on the cognitive benefits, motor skills, and so forth supposedly offered by cursive, please be careful to distinguish benefits derived from handwriting in general (including printing) versus those (if any) provided by cursive specifically. If schools want to teach it, fine. But the State shouldn’t mandate cursive based on legislators’ nostalgia or based on benefits kids will get from printing anyway.
I’ll close by quoting one of my many, many, many, many, many, prior entries on Sen. Leising’s efforts:
Sen. Leising has been tilting at this particular windmill for years since the State Board of Education made cursive discretionary for schools to teach. Advocates of cursive come up with post hoc rationalizations for why they care so much. It’s for the children, of course. But the justifications are specious:
“They need to be able to sign their name.”
Fine, spend a few hours one day teaching them to sign their name.“It affects brain development.”
You get the same development from printing.“They need to be able to read the original Declaration of Independence.”
When they get to this point, proponents of mandatory cursive are grasping at straws.The fact is that cursive is the slide rule of writing. Nostalgia is the motivation for hanging on to it. The world is changing, and that’s upsetting. The offered rationales are pretexts to justify the underlying nostalgia. If we just discovered cursive today, we would be in no rush to force it on our kids.
It’s such nonsense to fly the flag of “cognitive benefits” when there is probably no research to show any cognitive benefit at all. Frankly, I’d like to press those folks as to what specific cognitive benefit they may be thinking about, unless nostalgia is supposed to be a cognitive benefit. For that matter, considering the number of laws passed and causes where nostalgia is the prime mover and look at those cognitive giants at work. Maybe there is such a thing as a negative cognitive effect.
Republicans generally like to emphasize skills that are important in the workplace, so let’s look at this issue in that light.
I’ve been a senior (VP) manager or CEO of multiple companies over the past 20 years, directly responsible for hiring employees and/or setting hiring policies. I can unequivocally state that cursive writing ability is not one of the skills we consider, or have ever considered.
What we do consider, and what schools sometimes fall short on teaching, are critical thinking skills, math up to at least algebra, and the ability to effectively use the full suite of MS Office apps.
Senator Leising is doing the students of Indiana a huge disservice by trying to insist on teaching archaic skills. She might as well push basket weaving and making flint spearheads for all the good cursive writing does.
Jay, I’m guessing that you also don’t reward employees for advocating practices out of nostalgia that have been abandoned because they were seen as irrelevant to the operation of the company. In fact, those folks may end up in the “used to work here” category.
For truth in advertising, I should say that I have son at home who’s a 6th grader here. He’s had some great teachers in Indiana, he’s been able to take advantage of the amazing GERI Super Summer, Super Saturday and Comet programs at Purdue, and he’s way ahead of where I was at that age.
Still, teaching time is short and precious, and it infuriates me to see legislators meddling in the schools and wasting the time of both students and teachers for absolutely no good reason beyond “that’s the way we did it in my day”. Ok, done ranting now!
Jay, I don’t know where you live, but folks have forever wanted “gifted” programs from the schools. Gifted programs can be good things, but we did some things when our kids were young, and I passed on this advice to some friends who, to this day, are glowing: Take advantage of 4-H. It’s open to everyone, but if a kid has some ability, that kid can grow and learn on his/her own and learn to take responsibility at the same time. I have a friend who got his son in 4-H. That kid is now in an advanced university program. He was the only one who knew things about which the others had no clue, all because of 4-H.
I teach and remediate handwriting, and direct the World Handwriting Contest. You might expect I’d support Senator Leising’s cursive bill.
I oppose it. Here’s why.
Handwriting matters … does cursive? Research shows legible cursive writing averages no faster than printed handwriting of equal or greater legibility. (Sources available on request.) Highest speed and highest legibility in handwriting belong to those who join only some letters, not all— making the simplest joins, omitting the rest, using print-like shapes for letters whose printed and cursive shapes disagree. The research establishing this was done by, among others, Dr. Virginia Berninger, whom Leising quotes as favoring cursive. Leising never mentions that the handwriting programs Berninger lists as most effective include several which fit the research instead, by joining only the most easily joined letters and consistently using print-like letter-shapes. (At a 2012 conference on handwriting, Berninger was asked which handwriting programs she regarded as the best produced by our civilization. She instantly replied: “Those of Australia.” The handwriting programs in Australia’s six states — including programs labeled “cursive” — require or permit print-like formations for all or almost all letters, and require or permit lifting the pen within words in order to avoid the most cumbersome joins.)
Regional/national mandates for cursive, in other countries, have sad outcomes (including bad effects on handwriting) — http://morrellshandwriting.co.uk/blog/
Food for thought: the first handwriting textbooks ever published in our alphabet (500 years ago) taught a semi-joined, print-like style: the common cursive of the day. What we, today, call “cursive” did not emerge until the Baroque Era — although Leising prefers her audiences to believe that what we call “cursive” today must have existed before any of the other (and often better) handwriting forms. (In 2014, Leising even publicly claimed that cursive was necessary for learning to read from left to right: This is like claiming that six-foot-wide hoop-skirts or stovepipe hats are necessary for learning to get dressed.)
Reading cursive still matters — yet even children can be taught to read handwriting that they are not taught to replicate. Reading cursive can (and should) be taught in 30 – 60 minutes, to anyone who reads print. If reading cursive is the rationale for writing it — which Leising often claims — then let’s teach children to read cursive: along with teaching other vital skills, such as some handwriting style actually typical of effective handwriters. Far less time, money, and training are required for this actually practical goal.
What about signatures? Leising hopes you’ll never learn that,
in state and federal law, cursive signatures have no special legal validity over any other kind. Hard to believe? Ask any attorney! Or ask Governor Holcomb — or Steve Mnuchin, Secretary of the Treasury. (Mnuchin’s signature, on every dollar bill since he stepped in, is clear, efficient — and full of printed forms and pen-lifts. Holcomb’s signature, much less legible, is likewise full of pen-lifts and non-cursive letters. Both are fully legal.)
Educated adults increasingly quit cursive. In 2012, handwriting teachers were surveyed at a conference hosted by Zaner-Bloser, a cursive textbook publisher. Only 37% wrote in cursive; 8% printed. The majority — 55% — wrote a hybrid: some elements resembling print-writing, others resembling cursive.When even most handwriting teachers don’t write cursive, why mandate it?
Leising’s cursive bill has been rejected, year after year, by the House Education Committee — so she’s sometimes resorted to sneaking it around to every other House Committee, from Agriculture to Ways & Means.
In 2018, Leising was caught out misrepresenting the work of Indiana University researcher Dr. Karin Harman-James. Harman-James’s research had documented that handwriting (any handwriting) has educational advantages over keyboarding, but that wasn’t enough for Leising — who therefore misquoted the research by asserting that these advantages had been found only in cursive. Details: https://www.hoosiertimes.com/herald_times_online/news/local/iu-researcher-legislator-s-editorial-basically-lying/article_2f71ebc7-61cb-5650-be94-e1915b60d0d6.html and https://www.hoosiertimes.com/herald_times_online/opinion/and-another-thing/article_9e2d7358-9d29-5284-a1d2-3908fc771e69.html
Concerned citizens must ask a question Leising never answers: Why pass a bill whose introducer defends it by varying from the facts?
I hope that Doug Masson will similarly be probing the newest (in 2019) disturbing aspects of Senator Leising’s cursive capers. In addition to resurrecting her cursive bill as usual, and adding a new co-author (Senator Michael Young), this year she has also gotten Representative Klinker to “independently” (I suppose) introduce a similar bill in the House (HB 1162). It would be of interest to research what, if any, testimony or other public statements have been made by Young and Klinker with regard to the subject of these bills.
Indiana’s governor (Eric Holcomb) _prints_ his signature: in capitals, no less:
https://www.gannett-cdn.com/-mm-/91c2e5b3b5e28d8c6c544fe8c50593a7af06392b/c=50-0-2351-1730&r=x393&c=520×390/local/-/media/2018/02/28/INGroup/Indianapolis/636554262214761154-SundaySalesSigning-KW-008.JPG
The signature of the Secretary of the Treasury (Steven Mnuchin) is also printed, from beginning to end:
https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-jOqVY8YxAv0/Wg4xzduYLOI/AAAAAAAAzkA/lt8yioAUlIEDXw0wjAWDAL38m6gKrHd7gCLcBGAs/s640/awq812471931911326.jpg
Now, what was that again about “signatures requiring cursive”? If the cursive crusaders really believed their own public statements that signatures aren’t legal without cursive, they’d be refusing their paychecks. The fact that they continue to accept their pay (and that they don’t claim that Indiana bills signed into law are invalid) shows that they know enough to reject (for themselves) an argument which they want others to believe.