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“You don’t teach someone English by first teaching them Chinese,” Ms. Glad­stone says. “We need to decide what the best way to handwrite is and just teach that.”

That does not sit well with cursive traditionalists. “Hand­writing is an emotionally charged issue,” Gladstone adds. “I get letters from people calling me anti-American because I don’t like what they think of as ‘proper’ cursive.”

Gladstone promotes italic cursive, which she says is the fastest, most natural, and most easily readable form of handwriting. It’s also the easiest and quickest to teach children, she says. She also claims it’s the fastest-growing way to teach handwriting: 7 percent of students are learning this method, compared with 1 percent ten years ago. For homeschoolers, that number is 1 in 3, she says.

She recommends traditional cursive be an elective that children could take after elementary school if they wanted to.”