I'm going to address each one of your points since you didn't really bother to provide any corroborating evidence beyond one personal anecdote. "It's not reall

I'm going to address each one of your points since you didn't really bother to provide any corroborating evidence beyond one personal anecdote. "It's not really the case that memorising those lines have taken up useful brain space. On the contrary from all we know it probably made you better at memorising." I have heard of no study that indicates that rote memorization is some kind of magically distinct musculature in your brain that lets you memorize more rote information - the few studies that I have seen about improving your ability to memorize talk about that it's more important how you memorize information and the means and effort in which you used to encode it, for example creating highly vivid mnemonics. I will concede that if you take the time when memorizing information to consciously connect it to other information particularly seemingly disparate unrelated information, that this can help significantly with retention. But most people don't make an effort to do this, they just repeat the information and ad nauseum until it "sticks". "Similarly being able to write cursive gives you better fine motor control in your writing hand." One could just as easily apply the same logic to the fact that more kids play video games, and said video games require fine dexterity and control. "I learnt cursive at school, as well as use of a slide rule and log tables. They were obsolete by many decades when I was learning to use them. But are my arithmetic skills worse than the average zoomer who has a smartphone practically cemented into their hand? No, I'm fact I'm probably more efficient at using the calculator app on their phone." I don't even know how to respond to this seemingly wild conjecture. Every generation makes these exact same set of arguments (like learning To read and write Latin and Greek, the list goes on and on) and apparently you've fallen into the same trap. The bottom line is that we have a finite number of hours in which to cram an exponentially increasing amount of information to distill the entirety of the experiences and knowledge of mankind.