Why are schools still teaching cursive writing in 2025? It sounds like a simple question with an obvious answer — but the reality is far stranger and more revealing than you might expect. Right now, several US states have signed new laws requiring elementary school children to learn cursive, while at the same time, universities across the US and UK are encouraging — and in some cases requiring — students to use generative AI in their assignments. Both things are happening simultaneously. And that contradiction tells us something important about how educational systems understand technology, human value, and the future.
Why Are Schools Still Teaching Cursive in 2025?
If you grew up in the mid-2000s or earlier, you probably remember the hours spent carefully forming looping letters, connecting each one to the next, being graded on whether your handwriting looked elegant enough. And you probably also remember how quickly that skill became completely irrelevant the moment you left the classroom.
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Historical context on why cursive dominated before typewriters and ballpoint pens
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Cursive made genuine sense as a dominant writing form before typewriters, ballpoint pens, and computers existed. When most writing was done by hand using dip pens or fountain pens, the continuous strokes of cursive were more efficient and prevented ink blotting. Letters flowed together cleanly. It was a practical and dominant technology for its time.
But by the mid-1900s, typewriters changed the equation. Ballpoint pens eliminated the mechanical necessity of cursive. By 2006, only 15% of students chose to write in cursive when given the option during the SAT essay portion. By 2010, cursive was removed from the US Common Core standards — deemed no longer sufficiently relevant to mandate teaching.
And yet, as of 2026, multiple US states have passed new legislation bringing cursive back into elementary school curricula. This isn't a niche throwback policy — it's an active, legislated reversal. The question is: why?
Should Cursive Still Be Required in Schools?
Proponents of cursive instruction point to potential benefits: fine motor skill development, hand-eye coordination, and some studies suggesting cognitive engagement during handwriting. There's also a nostalgic and cultural argument — the ability to read historical documents, personal letters, and signatures written in cursive.
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Survey data showing 94% of UK undergrads now use AI in assignments
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But these arguments face an obvious problem: it isn't clear that learning cursive provides meaningfully more of these benefits than simply learning to write in print. And even if it does, the question remains whether those benefits justify the time cost — the hours taken from a school day that could be spent on skills with clearer, broader utility in modern life.
There's only so much time in a childhood. Every hour spent on cursive is an hour not spent on something else. And the honest answer to whether cursive should still be required in schools depends entirely on what we think schools are actually for — which turns out to be a much harder question than it first appears.
How Is AI Actually Changing Education Right Now?
Here's where the story gets genuinely strange. A 2026 survey by the Higher Education Policy Institute found that 94% of UK undergraduate students now use generative AI in at least some part of their assignments. Around 12% include AI-generated text directly in coursework. A 2024 Harvard survey found similar numbers in the US, with an additional finding: 25% of students have started substituting AI for attending office hours and engaging with course material.
Many universities aren't just tolerating this — they're encouraging it. Students are being guided to use AI as part of their workflow. The skill of interfacing with AI tools is being treated as a legitimate academic and professional competency.
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The Cave of the Hands in Argentina — nearly 900 hand stencils up to 40,000 years old
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So we arrive at a remarkable moment: children in elementary schools are being legally required to learn a handwriting style that's been functionally obsolete for decades, while adults in universities are being pushed to delegate thinking and writing to AI systems. Both trends are happening in the same educational ecosystem, at the same time, driven by different institutions with different assumptions about what matters.
It's hard to think of a clearer illustration of how confused modern institutions are about what education is actually for.
What Should Education Actually Prioritize Today?
This is the more fundamental question underneath the cursive debate and the AI debate. How do educational systems evaluate what they allow, teach, and incentivize? And how do those priorities shape the kinds of humans — and the kind of society — that emerge from them?
Technologies create a recurring paradox in education. Calculators, spell-check, search engines, and now AI — each of these tools has been simultaneously framed as cheating in an academic context while also being completely central to professional and everyday life outside of it. At what point does refusing to teach students how to use the dominant tools of their era become its own kind of failure?
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Comparing $400B in annual AI spending to the $280B total cost of the Apollo program
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And yet there's a real tension on the other side too. If AI can write the essay, do the analysis, and generate the ideas, what exactly is the student learning? What capacities are being built? What thinking is actually happening?
The answer probably isn't to ban AI or to mandate cursive. It's to ask much more carefully what we're actually trying to cultivate in human beings — and then build educational systems that pursue those goals with honesty and intention, rather than defaulting to tradition or chasing novelty.
What Is the Cave of the Hands and Why Does It Matter?
In a valley in Argentina, there's a cave called the Cueva de las Manos — the Cave of the Hands. Its walls are covered with nearly 900 negative hand stencils, each made by a person pressing their hand against the stone and blowing pigment around it. They range from 10,000 to 40,000 years old.
Similar hand stencils have been found in France, Spain, Indonesia, Australia, and Africa — made by people who never had contact with each other, across tens of thousands of years and thousands of miles. No words. No language we can read. And yet the message is unmistakable: I was here. I was human. I existed.
This matters to the cursive and AI conversation because it frames a deeper question: what happens to human expression as we progressively remove the human hand — and now the human mind — from what we create and communicate?
We've moved from hand stencils on cave walls, to handwritten cursive letters, to typed pages, to AI-generated text and images. With each step, the visible presence of a human being in the work diminishes. The hand is needed less. And now, increasingly, so is the mind.
As Neil Postman wrote: "Every technology is both a burden and a blessing. Not either or, but this and that." The question isn't whether this shift is good or bad — it's both, and it's neither. The question is what we consciously choose to preserve, and why.
Does Technology Change What It Means to Be Human?
Our bodies haven't changed much since the Paleolithic era. The hands that painted those cave walls would look identical to ours if pressed against the same stone. And yet the daily realities those hands navigate are incomprehensibly different.
Technology doesn't change what we are biologically. But it changes what we do, what we express, what capacities we exercise, and what we leave behind. Over time, it can change what we value — and therefore, gradually, who we become. We become what we behold. We shape our tools, and then our tools shape us.
Future generations will look back at this moment — our art, our communication, our ways of thinking and expressing — and try to understand us the way we try to understand those ancient hand-painters. What will they see? Will they recognize the same fundamental humanity? Or will they see something new: a different kind of negative stencil, made not by pressing a hand against a wall, but by pressing a psyche against a digital interface?
We genuinely don't know. But that uncertainty isn't a reason for paralysis. It's an invitation to be intentional — about what we teach, what we preserve, what we value, and what kind of humans we're trying to help form. Because what we care about is, ultimately, what we will become.
How Much Are Big Tech Companies Spending on AI?
To understand how seriously the technology world is treating this shift, consider the scale of current investment. In 2024 alone, Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft collectively spent over $400 billion building AI infrastructure. For context, the entire Apollo space program — adjusted for inflation — cost around $280 billion total. Current annual AI spending exceeds the cost of putting humans on the moon, and it's growing.
The difference, of course, is that with Apollo, we knew where we were going. With AI, we largely don't. The destination is unclear, the implications are contested, and the pace of change is outrunning most institutions' ability to respond — including the educational systems trying to figure out whether to teach cursive or how to handle ChatGPT.
That gap between the speed of technological change and the speed of institutional adaptation is exactly why conversations about education, human value, and the future of technology matter so much right now. The future isn't fixed. It will be shaped by people who understand what's happening and care enough to engage with it seriously.
