Indiana recently became the latest state to remove the require­ment for its schools to teach hand­writing, leading to the debate over whether cur­sive is out­dated in our dig­ital society or a crit­ical com­po­nent of youth learning. We asked Neal Lerner, an asso­ciate pro­fessor of Eng­lish and the director of the Writing Center at North­eastern Uni­ver­sity, to weigh in.