ST. PAUL, Minn. (FOX 9) - A new bill in Minnesota aims to bring cursive handwriting back to elementary schools.
Cursive handwriting curriculum
What we know:
A proposal in the Minnesota Senate would require the Commissioner of Education to develop a model curriculum for cursive handwriting. The goal is for students to achieve legible cursive skills by the end of grade 5.
Cursive proposal
The backstory:
The proposal pulls funds from the general fund to provide grants to school districts to adopt the cursive curriculum. This funding is targeted for fiscal year 2026.
The exact amount of money to be appropriated for the grants is not specified in the bill.
Importance of reading cursive
What they're saying:
During a hearing on Monday, Minnesota lawmakers argued cursive education is critical because of the use of cursive in America's founding documents like the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
Senator Ann Rest referred to a project going on right now through the National Park Service and National Archive where they are seeking translators for Revolutionary War documents.
"Applications for pensions by Revolutionary War soldiers that are really only cognitively available if you can read cursive," said Rest. "Interestingly enough, to me at least, the technology that is least able to do it is artificial intelligence. It cannot understand the variations that come in cursive writing to be able to translate those documents. So who do they have to depend on? People. People who can read it."
Rest also explained she was inspired to bring the bill forward after she wrote a birthday card to her grandson in cursive – and her grandson couldn't read the message.
"He handed it back to me and said, 'Grandma, I can't read this,'" recalled Rest. "And I had to sit there and read to him what I had said to him, and congratulating him on his birthday. That inspired me to look into why isn't cursive taught in Minnesota?"
Sen. Julia Coleman also shared a story about her sister who she says can't even sign her name.
"I do think that it's a lost art," said Coleman. "I'm a Millennial and my sister is Gen Z. She cannot sign her name unless she's just writing out the letters. And I think that's so sad for our students that that's not something that they're being currently taught."