Here’s a true Christmas story starring the U.S. Postal Service and Santa Claus.

Earlier this week, my wife Colleen went to our local post office in Los Angeles to mail a present to her relatives in Nebraska.

The address on the package was carefully written in Colleen’s beautiful handwriting, but after she gave it to the employee behind the counter, he looked up at her and said, “I can’t read that.”

“What?” Colleen said.

“I can’t read cursive,” the postal clerk said without shame. “You’ll have to print that address.”

Colleen ended up printing out the address so the post office worker could read it. Then he typed it into a computer, printed a label and slapped on the package.

The U.S. Postal Service is an infamously inefficient and expensive government monopoly that deserved to be privatized out of existence decades ago, so it’s really not shocking that it employs a clerk who can’t read cursive.

But it’s really not the clerk’s fault. He’s most likely a victim of our public education industrial complex.

Forget cursive. Statistically, given the sad state of our government schools, he’s lucky he can read at all.

As is well known, and has been reported in the media for decades, more than half of all kids in public schools cannot read or do math at their grade level.

In 2024, only about 31 percent of 4th graders and 29 percent of 8th graders scored at or above “Proficient” in plain old reading.

To the poor mis-educated postal clerk, cursive — which virtually all of us, our parents and grandparents learned along with their ABCs and times-tables — might as well have been Greek.

My grandchild in fourth grade can read and write in cursive, but that’s because she goes to a Catholic private school where they never stopped teaching it.

In 2010, most California public schools dropped cursive after the state adopted the Common Core standards, which foolishly did not require it.

Cursive became an optional “learning goal” in some grades, but it basically disappeared or was haphazardly taught.

Somehow it miraculously became mandatory again in California for grades 1-6 starting on Jan. 1, 2024. But there’s a lost generation of kids out in the world who become helpless when confronted by even the most beautiful cursive writing.

Dropping cursive in California for 14 years and in many public schools elsewhere has caused a problem for the Post Office.

Its modern mail-sorting machines have trouble reading hand‑addressed mail, so letters or packages with cursive addresses often get rejected and have to be processed by a human. It’s a small percentage of the billions of pieces of mail that are handled each day, but it amounts to millions of pieces.

Because the Post Office has so many cursively challenged younger workers, it has to have a special training center in Salt Lake City where they are given a crash course in reading cursive.

My wife’s experience with the clerk may explain why some of our hand-addressed letters and birthday cards in past years never got to Nebraska or other places.

It might also explain why some of the Christmas presents we sent or were expecting to arrive never showed up.

We used to blame those little seasonal tragedies on poor Santa Claus. But it turns out the root cause of the problem is the failure of our schools.

We should never have suspected Santa. Even little kids know he has the best parcel delivery system in the world — a privately owned one that’s a thousand times better than our government mail service.

Plus, Santa and his elves are old school. They can read cursive.

Copyright 2025 Michael Reagan