Illustration by Roy Scott/Ikon Images Nation & World Is cursive worth learning? Pencil-and-paper asks more of a student than a keyboard. Maybe that’s the point. September 30, 2026 4 min read Part of the Wondering series A series of random questions answered by Harvard experts. Catherine Snow is the John H. and Elisabeth A. Hobbs Research Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Perhaps cursive went out of style because there was a sense that it was just a technical skill, and one that was becoming less and less necessary with the universal availability of keyboards. There’s this sense that there’s a “problem” of putting stuff on paper, and the technic...