We've watched education change dramatically over nearly 30 years. Chalkboards to whiteboards to smart boards. Paper registers to digital platforms. Handwritten letters home to emails to apps. Most of these changes have been good — or at least neutral. But there's one shift happening in classrooms right now that we think deserves a more careful conversation. And that's the quiet disappearance of cursive writing.
We're not saying this as people who are resistant to technology. We're saying it as people who care deeply about what children leave school knowing how to do — and what we, as teachers, are responsible for preserving.
What is actually happening.
More and more schools — in South Africa and around the world — are removing cursive handwriting from their curricula to make room for computer skills and coding. On the surface, this seems reasonable. The world runs on keyboards. Students need digital fluency. Time in the school day is finite.
But what gets lost when cursive writing disappears is not just a style of writing. Research consistently shows that handwriting — particularly the flowing, connected nature of cursive — activates different parts of the brain than typing does. It supports reading comprehension, memory retention, and fine motor development. Children who learn cursive tend to be stronger readers. The connection is real and it is well-documented.
We are not choosing between the past and the future. We are choosing what kind of minds we want to develop.
The practical problem no one talks about.
Here is something that rarely makes it into the curriculum debate: signatures. Legal documents, contracts, forms of identification — they require a signature. A signature that is unique, that cannot easily be replicated, that carries legal weight. A signature that is, in essence, cursive.
As cursive becomes rarer, signatures become simpler — and simpler signatures are easier to forge. This is not a theoretical risk. Identity theft involving forged signatures is a real and growing problem. And we are, slowly, producing generations of adults who cannot write in cursive at all.
What this means for you as a teacher.
If you teach primary school, you are on the front line of this decision. Whether your school has removed cursive from its curriculum or not, you have the ability — and we'd argue, the responsibility — to expose your students to it. Not as a formal assessment item if the curriculum doesn't require it, but as something worth knowing. Worth experiencing. Worth practising.
Technology is a tool. It is an extraordinary tool and we want our children to use it well. But tools can be picked up and put down. The cognitive habits formed in childhood — the patience, the precision, the physical engagement with language that handwriting develops — those are harder to rebuild later.
The best classrooms we've seen — locally and internationally — are not the ones that have chosen between technology and tradition. They are the ones that use both thoughtfully. A child who can code and write in cursive is better equipped than one who can only do either. Don't let the urgency of the digital age convince you that everything old is dispensable. Some of it is irreplaceable.
Trends are cyclical. The pendulum always swings back. We suspect cursive will have a revival in years to come — just as vinyl records and analogue photography have found new appreciation in a digital world. The teachers who kept it alive in their classrooms will have given their students something quietly precious.
— The Eduplace Family