Thanks for posting this, Mike. This is the kind of story the NYT does very well.
I may even look around for a website with some exercises to improve my handwriting, it being all block capital letters right now.
"Blair" Maryland ping.
Why is that, I wonder? I tutor off and on and I just can't believe that lecture material has become more dense. From my own experience, I'd have to say that students are no longer taught how outline lectures.
But the handwriting angle is interesting. Mine has degraded, no doubt. In fact, I was thinking of teaching myself copperplate this summer to sharpen it up a little.
Cursive is useless. It requires the same low-tech equipment to produce as hand printing, and is harder to read. It is in the process of going extinct. I went through school before the computer age -- even in college many of my research papers were handprinted, rather than typed -- and haven't used cursive since early elementary school.
I was doing research at the coroner's office a couple of weeks ago, reading the reports from the early 1900s. It was a pure pleasure reading the handwriting, nothing was illegible, the gentleman must have been throughly trained in the Palmer method.