In recent years, more and more schools have started to equip their students with personal computers, simplifying how teachers teach their materials and how students complete their assignments. This raises concerns about whether or not handwriting instruction is longer necessary in elementary schools as students are getting more and more familiar with typing to complete their works. Many articles and researches have been done in regard of this issue. While it is true that the world is shifting toward technology, it is still very essential for people to know how to handwrite. In fact, cursive handwriting should be the most important handwritten style being taught to kids from a very young age, mainly because of the benefits it brings to children's mind and growth, the unavailability of technology in different circumstances, and the necessity of handwriting in cases where technology is not doing good enough to help.

To start, cursive handwriting has a lot of positive impacts on the growth in children's mindset and lifestyle. Studies have pointed out that having good handwriting reduces chanes to have "problems retrieving letters from memory; spelling accurately, [...] interpreting the context of words and phrases" (Source D). Clearly, handwriting helps with literacy development. As young people are getting more and more used to typing on their electronic devices, it is not hard to catch some of the frequency mistakes they make, such as confusing between "their," "they're," and "there," or between "your" and "you're." The reason this is made possible is because children are not trained to handwrite enough. Requiring students to handwrite more inside and outside of class would help avoid this issue. Another positive effect of handwriting is how children "are benefited both in their cognitive development and in developing motor skills" (Source D), and those skills are going to improve the quality of life of many students as they do different things. This benefit is also acknowledged by the other side of the debate, saying "learning cursive does offer some benefits [such as] develop[ing] fine motor skills" (Source E). It is safe to say handwriting is going to benefit a person a lot throughout their life, even in the years they think they would never have to handwrite, the skills they have acquired from cursive handwriting, without the knowledge of the person, continue to help them.

Another key factor of why handwriting should be priotized over typing that people on the opposite side of the debate forgot to consider, is the fact that technology is not always available for anyone. In fact, universal access to technology in schools in the United States was not a thing twenty years ago. In 2013, there was a national survey of 450 elementary school teachers in the United States asking about how muh of their time students spent writing on paper and how much of their time they spent using technology. The result was rather not surprising. In every single grade, students spent more time writing on paper than typing on their devices (Source F). The gap between the time spent for technology and the time spent for handwriting increases as the grade level goes up. Different interpretations can be utilized to explain why the graph looks the way it is. One way to approach this graph is to think that not all schools are available to provide technological devices to every single student, which is an important factor. It is costly to provide personal computers to students, way more costly than it is to teach and have students write in cursive handwriting. Another approach is that teachers prefer to have their students handwrite the assignments anyway, and that there are cases where it would be very challenging for students to "write" using keyboard. This observation was also made when David Kysilko claims that "there are and will likely always be times when handwriting notes or lists will be necessary or more convenient--and cursive is faster than printing" (Source D). And it makes sense. Just imagine having to wait for more than thirty seconds to wait for a device to start versus taking out a piece of paper and a pen in ten seconds. The convenience lies not at the speed of writing versus the speed of typing, but rather at what happens before that. Last but not least, it is not easy to do math and physics problem using the keyboard either. Many teachers and students would agree with this. Henceforth, while technology has a lot of benefits in ideal conditions, chances are students and people are going to continue to use handwriting over typing because of the invisible convenience it has, and that is why handwriting instruction should be the priority.

Many people on the other side of the debate would argue that cursive handwriting instruction would no longer be a thing in just a few years because of time-consuming it is. A second-grade teacher at Cohoes, New York once told CBS 6 Albany that "she would rather 'move on' and focus class time on other topics" (Source A). This answer infers that teaching cursive handwriting is taking a lot of her precious time, and that she does not think it is necessary anymore to teach children how to write in cursive. While this seems convincing at first, it actually does not make sense when people start to do some searches. It is not hard for anyone to find a "cursive letter practice worksheet" on the internet, where the example letters are already written with the marginal lines prepared for the student to write on (Source B). Just this one single file refutes the claim that cursive handwriting instruction is time-consuming. It does not take a lot of time to print multiple copies of this worksheet and pass them out to students. Teachers can then be smart about how to balance between teaching other materials and teaching handwriting, or even assigning it as homework. The blame should not just be on the fact that teaching cursive handwriting takes a lot of time. It does take time, but resources are available to make instruction easier and faster. Some might also argue that cursive handwriting is not as important as writing in print or just typing. But to many people, "cursive writing identifies you as much as your physical features do" (Source C). And fortunately, this characteristic is not constant! Just like how workers used to slowly change their script to "fewer curlicues and strokes" in order to adapt to the fast-pace working environment (Source C), students of today are also seen changing their writing style a little bit in order to take notes faster. Even when all students are taught the exact same cursive handwriting style, they would all end up having unique handwriting that benefits them and identifies them. Handwriting identifies a person, is it not the origin of something called signature? Therefore, it is safe to say just teach students how to write cursive at first, eventually they will write in a way that is best for them. Combined with all the cognitive and literary skills they acquired, that would make them a good person in society.

To conclude, all elementary schools should think about handwriting instruction in a serious way because of the benefits it has for the development of kids as students and as citizens of society. Out of many great inventions throughout history, the invention of printing press was the most revolutionary and completely changed the course of development of humanity. As great as it is, it does not replace handwriting at all. Starting from 2025, many Advanced Placement exams provided by College Board are going to be taken by high school students across the United States using their own technological devices, such as Chromebooks. Even so, there are subjects such as Physics or Calculus that continue to be taken on papers (along with computers). Clearly, handwriting is proven to be irreplacable, and there are doubts that it is going to be vanished in the future. Instead of not focusing on handwriting instruction, schools should adapt to the changing world, and integrate both technology and handwriting to their curriculum, not only to make the job of graders or readers easier, but also to raise students up has good citizens with cognitive, motor, and literacy ability. That is the responsibility of a school, starting from the smallest detail as handwriting instruction.