Okay but you don’t have to handwrite it in cursive.
On the other hand, I don't think the difference is huge, so the value of it depends a lot on how much time it actually takes to teach cursive vs teaching non-cursive.
From the Boomers, Gen-X, and Millennials I know who were taught cursive in school very few use it for note-taking. It seems like a huge waste if the only reason for teaching it has failed multiple generations already.
After leaving college and not needing to write much after a decade or two, its jarring enough to get used to writing in block script.
I can at least understand the idea of writing printed characters by hand - the difference between that and cursive isn't that large, and is non-existent for the above. But to forego handwriting entirely doesn't seem plausible to me, in these subjects at least.
I don't think I've heard anyone advocate for getting rid of handwriting. All I'm saying is I got very out of practice after leaving school. In school handwriting was almost exclusively for personal use. I toyed with digital note-taking at the time and realized it was terrible.
> the difference between that and cursive isn't that large
:shrug: Like I said above, the three or so generations I've seen in the US got a couple years of cursive, never saw the value in maintaining it on their own and got very out of practice. The distinction is strong enough that decades old references stick around in my head [1]. A lot of people live with terrible block handwriting. I took an online class and started handwriting notices and realized how out of practice I was with block writing because of how illegible it was and how soon my hand started cramping. I never got comfortable enough with cursive to be faster and/or more legible than block handwriting.
American “cursive” is what is known in other countries as script. It’s the kind of thing you might learn on a calligraphy course. Although there is overlap, it’s not the same as e.g. what in the UK is known as “handwriting” which is writing with the letters joined together explicitly for the purpose of comfort and efficiency with zero aesthetic intent.
At least for me, though I believe the majority of the UK would agree, handwriting (“cursive”) is what I use in daily life, e.g. writing a shopping list, and that print is reserved for whenever I want to be neat and formal and have others understand my handwriting - but it’s kind of a chore to write.
Now, in later classes, especially in middle and high-school, developing your own handwriting style was common and not problematic - and many, including myself, adopted some print letters while still using many cursive ones as well.
[0] https://www.suntparinte.ro/uploads/resource/59/23/12//litere...
Rather, cursive evolved because it was faster to scrawl words onto paper without lifting up the pen, and the formal version taught in schools was essentially a prescriptivist version of a quick scrawl. It was invented to help you write faster.
In particular, I've heard the myth that if you lift a fountain pen up, it might drip on the paper, so it's better to write in one continuous motion. Fountain pens haven't been leaky for the last few hundred years (when well-maintained). By contrast, ballpoints used to leak tons of ink before precision manufacturing and plastics became cheap.
I have watched this in a different context in China: The government mandated the teaching of Mandarin (which is simply the Beijing dialect) but did not object to also teaching the local dialect. Kids learned the local dialects to communicate with those who only spoke the local dialect. However, at least in the cities the people who don't speak Mandarin have pretty much died out and if alive they aren't very active in society. The young generation sees no reason to learn the local dialects and the schools don't teach them anymore.
For those who don't know the situation: The grammar and the like are identical, all that varies is what is said. Unlike an accent, however, they are not mutually intelligible. I have seen my wife (Shanghai-born, speaks half a dozen of the dialects from nearby cities) switch dialects to something she knew the person she was speaking to would understand but the eavesdropper she was trying to avoid would not. The written form was standardized (at least on the mainland, Taiwan still uses the old ways) earlier, even when two people can't understand each other they can communicate by writing. This results in the apparently nonsensical subtitling of Chinese movies in Chinese. It also results in what I call fingerwriting: when faced with a word the other person doesn't understand you will often see them take a finger and write the character on the palm of the other hand.
The few people alive today who actively still use cursive to write are just as equally capable of handwriting in a block or printed format, it's not a language or even a dialect.
And nothing of import today is written in cursive. (Not books, or literature, or legal texts, or contracts, nothing)