The numbers come first: as of 2026, more than 25 states — including Pennsylvania, Florida, California, and Michigan — require cursive instruction in their public schools. That is a long way from 2013, when North Carolina became the first state to pass a cursive mandate, requiring students to read and write in cursive by the end of fifth grade.
By 2015, 14 other states had some form of cursive requirement on the books. The trend has only accelerated since.
From 45 minutes a day to an afterthought
The decline of cursive was decades in the making. In the first half of the 20th century, penmanship was taught as a distinct subject in American elementary schools, with children spending as much as 45 minutes a day on handwriting instruction and practice. By the 1980s, that had been cut to 30–60 minutes per week in some schools.
The 1990s standards-based movement crowded school curricula with new content. Then the Common Core state standards, adopted in some fashion by 45 states between 2009 and 2014, called for students to learn keyboard typing — effectively sealing cursive's fate in many classrooms.
Why lawmakers are pushing back
Legislators are citing a range of reasons for the mandates. Pennsylvania and Florida argue that an informed citizenry must be able to read historical documents, which are frequently written in cursive script. A Michigan representative made the case in 2025 that cursive preserves family history — her granddaughter was able to read a letter from her deceased father only because her school had continued to teach the skill.
Then there is the AI angle. A California assembly member argued that requiring students to write in cursive is a practical tool for ensuring they are not using artificial intelligence to complete their schoolwork. It is a low-tech solution to a high-tech problem, and it is landing in state legislatures.
The science backs the revival
The policy push is not without an evidence base. A 2020 study conducted in Norway hooked up 12 adults and 12 preteens to brain-imaging devices while they wrote in cursive, drew, and typed. Researchers found that writing in cursive activates the brain waves and neural pathways associated with learning and memory. Cursive instruction is also associated with better outcomes for learners with dyslexia and dysgraphia, a neurological learning disability that makes writing difficult.
First graders in Portugal taught cursive wrote in longer 'bursts,' which researchers attributed to the unbroken flow of cursive writing.
The editorial read
This is what a genuine back-to-basics movement looks like: states reasserting control over curriculum, pushing back against the top-down standardization that stripped practical skills from classrooms in the name of modernization. The Common Core era promised efficiency and delivered a generation that cannot read the Declaration of Independence in its original hand.
The AI dimension is telling. When the administrative state and the education establishment spent decades optimizing schools for keyboard fluency, they inadvertently created a system with no natural defense against machine-generated text. Cursive — analog, personal, unreplicable by a language model — turns out to be a feature, not a relic. Free enterprise did not create this problem; a centralized, standards-driven bureaucracy did. The states correcting it deserve credit for listening to parents and the science alike.
