I was upset when I first heard that the teaching of cursive writing is being phased out in many schools. I couldn’t imagine a grade-school education without it, and I didn’t see how in the world we could get along without that link to our tradition. Had anybody thought this through? How will people sign their names in a unique way that identifies them? I know we have computers, but how will we write things that need to be more personal? How will law enforcement get along without being able to use handwriting to identify forgeries? And in a few years nobody will know how to write or read cursive, and then what happens to all the old historic documents that are written in it?

Besides, I loved writing in cursive and had filled many a notebook and journal and written hundreds of letters with it over my lifetime. Learning to write in cursive was a grade-school milestone and a personality marker as well.

It turns out, according to what I read on the Internet, that cursive has needed to be phased out because teaching it was just too time-consuming for teachers when printing worked just as well and they had so much other material to cover. I read argument for both sides, some educators saying that learning to write in cursive stimulates students’ brains and helps them to develop motor skills, others arguing that cursive had been invented mostly for practical reasons, such as to make writing go faster, and involved little benefit to students and a lot of wasted time, since students are still taught to print. These experts also said that all the objections had been considered in the decisions to discontinue teaching cursive, that anyone can learn to read cursive even if they don’t know how to write it; and that a signature written in cursive handwriting has no more legal validity than any other kind of written signature.

Still my own thoughts on the subject were that cursive handwriting was the last remnant of personal identity left to us, our signature the one thing we could do that was unquestionably our own, except our fingerprints. We could identify the handwriting of people we knew; it was a strangely reliable sort of knowledge. And our signature could identify us, could be our passport to privileges and trusts nobody else could touch. How could society get along without it? I really did wonder. And I really did resent the idea, the same way I’ve resented a lot of things the digital age has done to my early assumptions and learning.

But the truth is, I can’t remember the last time I saw anything written in cursive by anyone in my family except me.

So which philosophical point of view do I believe the most—hang on to what’s getting away, or don’t try to hang onto anything because it doesn’t matter?

I have a computer at home and I use it, but I will never be as proficient on it as my younger relatives. And I still use cursive in my own life all the time. But I watch the kids in my family, my grandchildren—so brave, so funny, so smart, so quick, so ready, so full of knowledge I don’t have and never will have, and I ask, why would I want them to write in cursive?