"In fact, cursive writing is a bit like sex: Youngsters are going to do it whether we like it or not" I think that's ignoring the point. The question to wheth

"In fact, cursive writing is a bit like sex: Youngsters are going to do it whether we like it or not" I think that's ignoring the point. The question to whether or not to teach cursive isn't top down, based on some ideological desire of some school administrators. No, it's because the teachers and administration are noticing that the students aren't writing in cursive, and it's a waste to be expending class time on improving a skill which will never be utilized when there are more productive uses of that time. I remember in third and fourth grade the teachers kept saying that by the time we reached high school there was an expectation that everyone was proficient in writing cursive, that all our assignments must be written in cursive. That was the last time I've had to write cursive. Sure the plural of anecdote is not evidence but I've yet to encounter a situation where cursive isn't effectively dead. There's no way you can ignore printed script, because nearly all the text that anyone will ever encounter is print-style. Writing in print and learning to read is a pretty obvious combination. Expecting to learn to read one way and write another is unrealistic. I can't imagine the argument that cursive is more _readable_. Certainly cursive is often pretty, and that may lend the claimed aesthetic quality, but readability beats aesthetics for content any day.