AI Summary
5 min read“Ten minutes a week.” That’s how much time the average kindergarten teacher now spends explicitly teaching handwriting, according to University of Iowa special education professor Sean Datrick. That vanishingly small number captures a quiet revolution in American education—and in how we relate to the written word. Since the adoption of the Common Core standards around 2010, schools have been encouraged to move students from print handwriting to keyboarding as early as second grade, and cursive was dropped entirely. But the pendulum is swinging back: roughly 26 states have passed legislation reinserting cursive into their curricula, driven by post-pandemic reading score dips and a growing sense that something important has been lost.
How handwriting changes the brain
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What you'll learn
- 1 (02:50) **How Handwriting is Taught in Schools Today** - Professor Sean Datrick explains the current state of handwriting instruction in K-12 education.
- 2 (07:07) **Is Pen and Paper Actually Better Than Screens?** - Datrick weighs the evidence for handwriting versus typing.
- 3 (09:10) **AI as a New Reason to Keep Handwriting Alive** - The rise of AI is pushing schools back toward handwritten exams.
- 4 (10:09) **What Students Lose Without Handwriting** - The moral and cognitive value of the personal, deliberate act of writing by hand.
- 5 (14:23) **The Cognitive Science of Handwriting** - Christine Rosen, a senior fellow at AEI, explains the deeper implications of writing by hand.
- 6 (16:21) **Why Slowing Down is a Good Thing** - The value of friction and downtime in a world of infinite scroll.
- 7 (17:23) **Are We Just Being Sentimental?** - The resurgence of handwriting and physical media among younger generations is more than nostalgia.
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Guests on this episode
Show Notes
How our relationship with writing has changed, and how that’s changed us.
This episode was produced by Dustin DeSoto, edited by Avishay Artsy, fact-checked by Melissa Hirsch, engineered by David Tatasciore, and hosted by Jonquilyn Hill.
A third grader practices his cursive handwriting at P.S.166 in Queens, N.Y. AP Photo/Mary Altaffer.
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