Bavaria's primary schools say goodbye to cursive!

Bavaria's primary schools say goodbye to cursive!

A lot is happening in primary schools in Bavaria: the topic of “cursive writing” is on the brink. The education authorities recently decided to abolish cursive writing in 43 primary schools and instead rely on a model project called “FlowBy”. This enables children to develop their individual handwriting directly from printed script, without having to take the detour via traditional cursive writing. This is a response to new studies that show that learning to write in cursive slows down children rather than helping them. The results of a study by Dr. Eva Odersky from the University of Eichstätt show that children who use print need an average of 22 seconds for a sentence of five words, while children who use cursive need two to three seconds longer. Odersky criticizes the fact that the connected letters in cursive lead to children making invisible curves when writing, which is not only more time-consuming but also often leads to illegible handwriting.

With the innovative “FlowBy” project, the Bavarian Ministry of Culture has developed a model that encourages children to experiment with different letter combinations in special “writing workshops”. In these workshops, children's handwriting in second, third and fourth grades is assessed based on criteria such as readability and speed of writing. The advantage of this approach: Children can work more quickly with a partially connected font and benefit from individual support that takes their abilities into account. This could significantly reduce the complexity of learning to read and thus help ensure that students are not overwhelmed.

Insights into the project

Observations from other federal states show that similar paths are already being taken. For example, Baden-Württemberg allows schools to decide whether they want to forgo cursive writing. In Switzerland, too, they have already gone one step further and have completely abolished cursive writing. However, the Bavarian Teachers' Association expresses concerns because many teachers view cursive writing as a fundamental technique for learning confident handwriting. This discussion about abolishing cursive writing has gained increasing momentum in recent months.

The core goal of the “FlowBy” model project is to make writing acquisition a single-phase process. This means that children are not taught in two phases as before - print and then cursive - but can start with print right in the first grade and develop their own handwriting straight away. Dr. Odersky discovered this in her doctoral dissertation, in which she analyzed writing samples from over 330 children at the end of fourth grade. Their results show that fluent writing is not necessarily linked to the type of writing used, but that printed writing can also be fluent. Teachers' decisions about when children can transition to cursive play a critical role in this process.

Shared future in the acquisition of writing?

The project is scientifically supported and evaluated up to the fourth grade. Depending on the results of these studies, the Ministry of Culture could make a fundamental decision in the 2026/27 school year about introducing single-phase writing learning and possibly abolishing the requirement to use cursive writing. However, the Bavarian Teachers' Association warns against making decisions too quickly and emphasizes the importance of individual decisions for each child. According to Angelika Speck-Hamdan from the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, however, it could now take at most a decade before a uniform regulation in the acquisition of writing becomes established.

The discussion about the future of cursive writing in Bavaria remains exciting and shows that the educational landscape is in flux. Whether this will lead to a fundamental change in the acquisition of writing remains to be seen. What is certain is that there are already various approaches to optimizing writing acquisition in other countries, and Bavaria could soon follow. A step that will not only affect teachers, but also parents and, above all, children.