A grandmother recently shared a story with me that stopped me in my tracks. On a form, her youngest grandson — a boy who attends elementary school in our region — dissolved into tears when asked to sign his name. The embarrassment he felt in that moment was palpable, and heartbreaking. It was not a failure of effort or intelligence: he had simply never been taught. It is, at its core, the failure of an educational program.

As a literacy specialist and educator with nearly two decades of experience in classrooms across New York City and New Hampshire, I have witnessed handwriting quietly disappear from schools. In its place: keyboards, touchscreens, and the assumption that if something can be typed, it need not be written.

But the research — and the lived experience of parents, grandparents, and educators — tells a very different story.

The Brain on Handwriting

In 2024, researchers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology published findings that should give every school administrator and policymaker pause. Using high-density electroencephalogram (EEG) technology, scientists found that handwriting — whether print or cursive — activates far more complex brain connectivity patterns than typing. The regions engaged are those most critical for memory, learning and encoding new information. Typing, by contrast, showed no such activation.

This is not nostalgia: this is neuroscience.

Writing by hand also forces us to slow down — to process, to think, to choose our words. It has been shown that note-taking by hand produces better conceptual understanding than typing, precisely because we cannot transcribe everything and instead must synthesize, a far more challenging cognitive task.

For young children, the benefits go even deeper: handwriting supports spatial awareness, fine motor development and the crossing of the body’s midline — a foundational neurological milestone.

A Cultural and Historical Loss

Beyond the cognitive benefits lies something harder to quantify, but no less important. Cursive connects us directly to history. Primary sources, family letters, historical manuscripts and the Declaration of Independence — these are all handwritten. A child who cannot read cursive is effectively cut off from the original record of human experience.

As one neighbor put it plainly: “If one wishes to do any historical research — your own family tree, historic events, records or annals — you need to know cursive. It needs to be taught.”

One neighbor took the argument even further, noting that a full appreciation of the written word requires understanding not just cursive, but the Old English alphabet as well — the script our great-great-great-grandparents learned. It is a reminder of how far we have come, and how much we stand to lose if we do not pause to honor the journey. The evolution of handwriting is, in many ways, the evolution of civilization itself.

Waldorf schools have long understood this. From printing in first grade to cursive in third, handwriting is woven into the Waldorf curriculum as a developmental necessity — supporting not just literacy, but the organization of thought, spatial reasoning and the relationship between hand, eye and mind.

Schools like Pine Hill in Wilton and Gathering Waters Charter School in Keene offer a compelling model for what intentional handwriting instruction looks like.

A Growing Consensus — and a Gap Between Mandate and Reality

The good news is that the tide is beginning to turn. Twenty-six states now require cursive to be taught in public schools, and the National Education Association has lent its voice to the cause.

In 2023, Gov. Chris Sununu signed HB 170 into law, requiring all public school districts to provide cursive instruction by the end of fifth grade.

But a mandate on paper is only as strong as its implementation. In my own experience teaching within our region’s schools, cursive was expected in the elementary grades — yet many teachers, already stretched impossibly thin, simply could not get to it. There were no workbooks, no dedicated time, no support. The requirement existed; the time for its adequate instruction did not.

This is not a criticism of teachers. Elementary educators are asked to do the work of many — and handwriting has too often fallen to the bottom of an ever-growing list.

But it should not. The writing process and handwriting are not competing skills: they are complementary ones. Handwriting mandates that learners slow down — it allows students to graphically organize ideas on a blank page. In the younger grades, we encourage storytelling through drawing, then adding labels and descriptions to the illustrations. Writing by hand gives our ideas form and shape.

The writing process — drafting, revising, developing — builds on that foundation. One without the other is incomplete. In an age of keyboards and voice-to-text, we must be intentional about what we mean by writing instruction.

The answer is now two-fold, and as each component supports the other: as we become more fluent writers by hand, our ability to generate and develop ideas is augmented.

A neighbor who grew up in South Shore, Mass., remembers handwriting as a subject unto itself — graded on report cards, practiced with care, even celebrated. She made sure her own daughters learned cursive at home, alongside manners and etiquette, because she understood that these things were not relics. They were foundations.

What We Owe Our Children

We are living through a paradox. We have more tools for communication than at any point in human history, and yet children entering middle school cannot sign their own names.

We speak endlessly about preparing students for the future — but what future are we preparing for if they cannot access the past?

Teaching handwriting is not about turning back the clock. It is about giving learners the full range of tools they need to think, to learn, to connect and to create.

The research supports it. The educators know it. And the grandparents — watching their grandchildren struggle with something as elemental as a signature — feel it in their bones.

It is time to pick up the pen.

Amelia Clune is a New Hampshire-based literacy specialist and educator with nearly two decades of experience in public, private and charter school settings.