[wrp]

> ...computers(and to a lesser degree typewriters) are what killed cursive.

In the USA, widespread use of cursive died out in the 1970s. Widespread use of personal computers came about a decade later. In public education over the 1970s, they largely abandoned the formal teaching of handwriting.

[StewardMcOy]

This may be true in much of the USA, but I know from experience that it's not true in California and Texas, the two most populous states. It's still required in Texas, and many California schools continue to teach it, even though it hasn't been required statewide since the early 2010s.

When I was in California public school in the 1990s, cursive was taught in elementary school. We spent a lot of time practicing it, far more than it deserved, even if you believed it was important, and many of the teachers were quite strict about it. In junior high, teachers still required in-class assignments to be written in cursive, claiming everything we wrote in high school would need to be in cursive. (Luckily, this wasn't true. I even had a few high school teachers who mandated a no cursive policy.)

[kthejoker2]

This is incorrect at least in 2022; my Texas educated children have never been taught or graded on cursive.

[StewardMcOy]

Googling around to try to figure out why our experiences are different, I found that the requirement was only brought back in 2019 for second and third graders. It appears Texas stopped requiring it in the early 2000s, only to bring it back a few years ago.

If your children passed third grade before the 2019-2020 school year, they wouldn't have run into the requirement.

https://www.fox4news.com/news/cursive-handwriting-requiremen...

[wrp]

OK then, so there is still great variation in educational policy between the states. I'm glad handwriting is still being taught somewhere. A map of where it is and isn't would be interesting.