We Taught Kids to Swipe Screens—Now They Can’t Even Read the Constitution. The sad story of Cursive...
America Quietly Deleted Cursive—And With It, Our History
“Gen Z can’t read cursive, so the government could drop the Constitution on the floor and nobody under 30 would even know what it says.”
That’s the joke.
But the punchline? That’s America.
We’ve built a society where kids can unlock a phone with their face but can’t unlock a handwritten birthday card from their grandma.
Now finally, finally someone’s doing something about it. Georgia just did what most states don’t have the guts to do: they brought cursive back.
Starting this fall, every third, fourth, and fifth grader in Georgia is going to learn how to write like a literate human being. Not a screen-zombie. Not a thumb-typer. But an actual person with a brain connected to a pen.
The Georgia Department of Education updated their English Language Arts standards for the 2025–2026 school year and boom. Cursive’s back on the curriculum.
And you know what? Real parents like Angelica Mills, a mom of four are thrilled. Her kids are already trying to learn it. She said it best: “It’s a struggle, but they’re learning, and that’s what’s important.”
She also said something that hit me like a frying pan of reality: “I thought it was already something the kids were learning.”
Yeah. She thought.
Because we all assumed cursive never left. But it did. It was quietly shoved out somewhere between digital obsession and bureaucratic buffoonery.
So where are we now? Here’s the scoreboard:
States Leading the Charge:
24–25 states currently require cursive in public schools.
These include Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Mississippi, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, West Virginia, and depending on the source, either Iowa or New Hampshire.
Georgia’s going all in—they’ve added a “John Hancock Award” to celebrate excellence in cursive.
States Still Dragging Their Feet:
Missouri, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, and New Hampshire have introduced legislation but haven’t pushed it across the finish line.
Some rural districts are even pushing back—saying cursive is less important than racial equity curriculums or tech skills.
Places like Maine, New Mexico, South Dakota, Rhode Island, and Wyoming leave it up to local school boards, meaning it's a coin toss whether your kid ever learns to sign their name.
Why This Is Even a Problem:
It all started with Common Core back in 2010. Since cursive wasn’t included in the standards, it got axed across the board.
Common Core was supposed to be a “floor” not a “ceiling”—but most states just stopped right there and never looked back.
Why It Matters:
The National Archives now says reading cursive is a “superpower.” They’ve got 300 million handwritten documents—early American history, birth records, treaties, letters—and they’re begging for volunteers to help transcribe because hardly anyone can read the damn things anymore.
Without cursive, kids are being taught to swipe apps instead of reading letters. To fill out forms online instead of signing their name in ink. To rely on autocorrect instead of developing a functional brain.
Programs like Lead with Literacy are stepping up. Families like the Mills’s are doing the work at home. And states like Georgia are proving that common sense can still make the curriculum.
This is about more than penmanship. This is about legacy. Memory. Independence.
So yes. Bring cursive back.
Bring back thinking. Bring back literacy. Bring back a country that doesn’t need Google Translate to understand its own damn founding.
And for the states still fumbling around like cursive is some ancient rune?
You’re not behind. You’re failing.
If your school district is not teaching cursive, stand up, yell out loudly and let it be known that you want your kids to learn Cursive!
Check the internet, does your state require your kids to learn Cursive?
Pick up a pen. Get to work.
THE purposeful numb down dumb down!!! When I first heard that cursive was being phased out was stunned! I was like what PHD did that? So folks couldn't read documents then was the response. People can't leave well enough alone. That was innovation also!!! enough of this ignorance
Back in the day when I was learning to write cursive, in the ‘50’s, practically ALL the teachers in my small town elementary school in the SE corner of CA, had very legible cursive handwriting. My 3rd grade and 4th grade teachers had beautiful cursive handwriting. But they were both ‘artistic’ types.
I was raised Catholic but did not go to Catholic School. But my brother and I went to ‘catechism classes’ at the local Catholic School, and pinned up all around the classroom above the blackboards, were pages of cursive handwriting papers of the students. And the older kids had to write these papers using a fountain pen! And the majority of the Catholic School kids had fairly good to beautiful cursive handwriting !