In a classic case of who the hell needed to do a report to figure out what was terribly apparent to anybody with eyes more and more people are unable to write in cursive. They are rightfully figuring out that handwriting is becoming an obsolete skill and that learning how to properly type and function on a computer is a much more important life skill and will continue to grow more and more important as we continue moving forward.
Most of the arguments against it I find truly laughable. One is that ancient documents will become unreadable to modern students. What documents are we talking about? The originial Constitution and Declaration? What else has the slightest bit of relevance that is ONLY available in handwriting? (not to mention enough of the letters are similar that a halfway inteligent person could stumble their way through anyway if they were so inclined.) Another is what if we find ourselves on a desert island. Which is the same argument we hear over why kids shouldn't be allowed calculators for math. The fact is that if we've woken up and we have lost acess to to all our computers we've got much bigger problems than getting exact change back from our twenty.
I'm not against teaching children to write manually, or even cursive. But clearly the emphasis should be on the skills that they are going to need on a daily basis. I see cursive as a skill like making your own butter or shoeing horses. I mean can't I still apply the what if we find ourselves in a world where peak oil occured and everybody has to ride horses again?
Its a dead skill. Keep it alive for the same reason we keep teaching Latin. Because someone decided that the past was worth saving.
