Why Cursive Mattered: Practicing the skill may have been laborious, but the art of penmanship is an invaluable resource for students to learn.

Since the U.S. Department of Education dropped cursive writing from standard national curricula in 2011, the debate on the value of learning penmanship has raged.

Some argue that the skill is obsolete, akin to learning how to use an abacus in the age of supercomputers. “[The] time kids spend learning to write curvy, connected words is time kids could be spending learning the basics of programming and any number of other technology skills they’ll need in our increasingly connected world,” wrote the blogger and podcast host Justin Pot in a spirited editorialrejecting the utility of such an “anachronistic skill.”

But for me, holding a Bic ballpoint pen—that anachronistic tool—always takes me back to third-grade penmanship class. Then, the cheap disposable pen was a trophy of achievement, and the day I upgraded from pencil to pen is as memorable as any graduation day.

Read the article “Why Writing in Cursive Still Matters” on theatlantic.com.