Cursive is making a comeback: Ontario to make learning script mandatory in school

Cursive is making a comeback.

Relegated in 2006 to an optional piece of learning in Ontario elementary schools, cursive writing is set to return as a mandatory part of the curriculum starting in September.

Education Minister Stephen Lecce said it is about more than just teaching students how to sign their own name.

"The research has been very clear that cursive writing is a critical life skill in helping young people to express more substantively, to think more critically, and ultimately, to express more authentically," he said in an interview.

Ontario's new language curriculum, set to be in place for the new school year, introduces a host of changes, including a renewed focus on phonics. Many of the curriculum additions can be traced back to a report last year from the Ontario Human Rights Commission, which said the province's public education system was failing students with reading disabilities and others by not using evidence-based approaches.

"If we want to boost reading instruction, we have to embrace some of those time-tested strategies that have worked for generations," Lecce said.

"A return to phonics and, for example, cursive writing is another example where the government is leaning into the evidence and following the voice of many parents who wanted us to really embrace those practices that for generations have worked."

The curriculum reintroduces cursive writing as an expectation starting in Grade 3. That's welcome news for language education experts.

"I think it is long overdue," said Shelley Stagg Peterson, a curriculum, teaching and learning professor at the University of Toronto's Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. "Cursive should never have been taken out of the curriculum."

There isn't a lot of research specifically on cursive writing, Peterson said, but the work that has been done shows that it not only teaches students the skill of writing that script in and of itself, but it helps to reinforce overall literacy.

"The more that young writers, beginning writers, are using their hands, they're using another modality to form the letters, that kinesthetic reproduction helps them to think more about the words that they're writing," she said.

"So it actually reinforces their reading, as well as their writing."

Hetty Roessingh, a professor emerita at the University of Calgary's Werklund School of Education, said cursive is a valuable skill.

"For note taking, for being literate, for engaging with the demands of school and civil society, your hands matter and you need to be able to write," said Roessingh, who specializes in the role of handwriting with quality writing outcomes.