Doug Hagmann

They Killed Cursive So You’d Need a Translator to Read Your Own History Two generations now. That’s what we’ve manufactured. You Can Thank Progressive Ideologue Randi Weingarten and the American Federation of Teachers In 2010, cursive was quietly stripped from Common Core. No debate. No vote. Just gone — replaced by keyboarding and test prep. Fast forward to today, and the results are exactly what any thinking person would have predicted. Drew Gilpin Faust — former Harvard president, not exactly a conspiracy theorist — walked into her Civil War seminar and discovered two-thirds of her Harvard undergraduates couldn’t read cursive. Two-thirds. At Harvard. One student admitted he’d reshaped his entire senior thesis to avoid sources with handwriting. Another abandoned Virginia Woolf because she couldn’t read Woolf’s letters. Let that sink in. The elite are being graduated illiterate in their own language’s written form. What’s actually been accomplished here? - The Declaration of Independence is now a foreign document to most Americans under 30. They can’t read it. They depend on someone else’s transcription — someone else’s framing. - Grandma’s letters from the war. Mom has to translate the birthday card. The direct, unmediated connection to your own bloodline? Severed. - Original manuscripts, land deeds, family Bibles, journals, contracts. All of it now requires a credentialed interpreter — a new priesthood of specialists who tell you what your history says. Faust herself spelled out the implication with brutal clarity: “Just imagine if you had some contract that you had signed and you couldn’t read it and someone told you, well, this is what’s in the contract. And then later you might find that it was something else.” That’s not a bug. That’s the feature. When a population can’t independently access primary sources, history becomes whatever the gatekeepers decide it is. The past isn’t discovered — it’s assigned. And a person who needs permission to read their own inheritance is a person who’s been quietly, thoroughly disempowered. The technocrats will tell you it was just pragmatic modernization. Nothing to see here. Just optimizing the curriculum for the 21st-century economy. Funny how the “optimizations” always seem to produce citizens more dependent, more disconnected, and easier to manage. Teach your kids cursive. Buy the workbook. Spend twenty minutes a day. Not because it’s charming or vintage — but because a people who can’t read their own founding documents in the original hand are no longer a free people. They’re tenants in their own civilization, renting access to a past that was stolen from them one curriculum meeting at a time.