Gen Alpha could bring handwriting back

Cursive handwriting is making a big comeback in schools for students of the Gen Alpha generation (born between 2010 and 2025). New Jersey and Pennsylvania are the most recent in a growing number of states to bring old-fashioned penmanship back into the classroom, with governors in both states enacting legislation this year requiring schools to teach it. New Jersey had stopped requiring it in 2010—but new legislation now mandates schools there to teach cursive to kids ages 8 to 11, in third to fifth grades. The Garden State follows about two dozen states in mandating that cursive handwriting be taught. Those states include California, which signed a law in 2024 requiring first through sixth graders to learn to write in cursive as part of the public school curriculum. Now, over half the states in the U.S. either require or strongly encourage schools to teach students to read and write in cursive, per Education Week. That’s a reversal of the trend of the last decade or so, in which