Graduate student who went to public schools in NWLA can't read cursive

Yahoo

30-01-2025

SHREVEPORT, La. (KTAL/KMSS) – LSU Shreveport graduate student Mik Barnes has a problem that many young college students in the United States are experiencing, too: he can't read cursive.
'I'm a history major,' said Barnes. 'One of the times it really got to me was when I was looking through an old arrest report book. We were trying to find when Wyatt Walker and Harry Blake were arrested in Shreveport during the civil rights movement, and the process of trying to read the cursive was really frustrating.'
Barnes is a member of the Caddo Parish Civil Rights Heritage Trail team with KTAL, LSU Shreveport, and Red River Radio. He has researched and written peer-reviewed papers and articles for the project that include:
Shreveport's David Dennis was architect of Freedom Summer of 1964
LSUS researcher finds links to the Confederacy while tracking family lineage
Hidden history: Clarence A. Laws and civil rights in the Deep South
Some Christians in Shreveport became non-violent during the Civil Rights Movement
Man survives Shreveport lynching attempt in 1915 and becomes international icon
Barnes graduated from high school in Northwest Louisiana, where he learned enough cursive in the public school system to write his name.
American public schools were deeply influenced in 2011 when the U.S. Department of Education's Common Core State Standards for English initiative did not include cursive in the curriculum. And many public school students who were initially impacted by the lack of cursive in the curriculum are now in college.
Mik said he knew something was wrong when he was around 12 or 13 years old.
'One of my great aunts had just passed,' Barnes said. 'We were looking through some of her old writings in a book, and I didn't know what it said.'
Barnes took three foreign language classes to satisfy his undergraduate degree, and he says cursive is like a foreign language to him.
'I can usually tell that it's English by the uppercase letters,' said Barnes, who also said it's embarrassing. 'It makes research harder and take longer, because sometimes I have to go and look up the cursive alphabet, lowercase and uppercase, and try to figure out what I'm looking at. If you just handed me something in cursive and asked me to read it, I'd need a second.'
Barnes is Dr. Gary Joiner's research assistant at LSU Shreveport, and Joiner said that learning to read cursive is similar to deciphering ancient Roman texts.
'When I was taking Roman history, and looking at documents and buildings, I was deciphering what the Romans were talking about on their monuments,' admitted Joiner. 'It is frustrating as it can be, because you're asking yourself, 'Why can I not do this?''
Joiner said that reading historic documents that are written in cursive can be tricky for people who do know how to read and write modern cursive. During the mid-1800s, English was getting away from an s that looked like an f. And reading artistic styles of handwriting can complicate a researcher's experience with historic documents just as much as poor penmanship.
'It's practicing, practicing, practicing, and getting it into your mind as sort of another reality,' said Joiner of reading historical documents written in cursive.
Joiner said he's astonished by the number of his students that can't read cursive by the time they reach college.
'It's as if people have some sort of cognitive impairment. But it's not–it's a form of illiteracy.'
Joiner said that cursive matters.
'Think of someone at the clerk-of-court, researching a handwritten will from a family member. Or somebody on the police force who is looking at old handwritten notes that could be used as evidence.'
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Joiner believes that a generation's inability to read cursive will affect a fairly large segment of the population.
'It's anti-societal,' said Joiner. 'Young students not being taught cursive erases history and culture. You're creating voids in someone's education.'
'Teach your kids cursive while they're reading,' said Barnes. 'Please. Some of the letters do look the same. An i sometimes looks like an e, depending on who writes it.'
'Teach them cursive and teach them how to form letters properly,' Dr. Joiner recommends. 'When we were looking at the Citizens Workbook, we read that a man was happy because he learned how to write his name and didn't have to use the x anymore.'
This workbook changed the Civil Rights Movement
'The only thing I could write in cursive was my name,' said Barnes.
'I think it's for times' sake to prepare students to take standardized tests,' said Barnes.
Joiner added that it all comes down to teaching to the test.
'We're leaving people in the dust,' said Joiner. 'You're not taught to think critically. You're taught to get past this test to the next one. We're creating a society of parrots–I'm gonna tell you some stuff, and you'll tell it back to me in the exact form I want you to do. But that's not learning. That's not critical thinking. That's just remembering.'
In 2017, Louisiana passed a new law requiring cursive to be part of public school curriculums. Pro-cursive laws are also in place in Alabama, Arkansas, California, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia.
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