California just passed a law requiring schools to teach cursive writing to students.

It’s 2024.

Like most people, I learned how to write in cursive while in school. Yet I can probably count on one hand the number of times I’ve used it since graduating.

Aside from writing my signature, I never use it. And when I do it’s a bastardized version at best — the reality is more of an illegible scribble.

Cursive writing is a fading relic from the past. An antiquity, bordering on archaic. What’s next, teaching children to speak in Old English?

I won’t go as far as to suggest that there is no value in knowing or understanding cursive writing. But there is zero justification for making its learning mandatory.

I’ve argued this in the past and the only two points ever brought up are signatures and the ability to read documents written in cursive. And in today’s age, both are moot.

First, as I mentioned earlier, most signatures are hardly traditional cursive. Signatures are whatever the owner creates for themselves. And that’s on the few occasions where most people use them. Soon enough they’ll all be digital anyway.

As for reading cursive, we’ll have an app for that — if we don’t already. AI will be able to digest cursive and spit it out as plain text in an instant. For the same reason I don’t need to learn Japanese to travel to Japan, kids won’t need to know cursive to understand what’s written in it.

There are bigger problems in the world than a generation’s inability to write in cursive. The fact that it’s a mandated class is utterly ridiculous.

If you want to learn cursive — or Egyptian hieroglyphs for that matter — you can take an optional class.

Maybe instead of teaching kids how to write in a dying format, we could teach them how to do taxes, code, cook, change their oil, change a tire, boost a battery, do basic home repairs, use critical thinking, communicate, manage stress, speak in public, start a fire, do first aid, create a budget, negotiate, or use basic common sense.

Literally anything practical would be a better choice for mandatory study.

But no. Let’s teach them how to write fancy in a keyboard world.