I can tell you there has been a slow war against cursive for many decades. My brother, a lawyer, says secretaries show up looking for work who can only print their names.
Don Potter, a phonics expert, believes that learning to read is much more difficult without cursive.
But here’s the problem for the sight-word gang. Upper and lower case is already a big problem for the kids because “bike” and “BIKE” are quite different, as different as S and $. Then you add handwriting or script, and that’s three versions of each word that the kids have to memorize. It’s quite insane and makes Whole Word even more impossible than it was before. To eliminate this problem, so-called literacy experts quietly tried to drive cursive out of the schools, not because this was a good idea, but to save sight- words!
(Also, I believe, the schools slowly drove second languages out of the early grades, for the same exact reason. All the experts agree that children learn foreign languages most quickly. What do you know? Almost no public school teaches a second language at the elementary level.)
I suspect it’s true.
I got pulled out for an hour of “gifted” instruction starting in kindergarten, and the teacher had a free hand on what she was allowed to teach. She was American born but had lived for several years in Spain and spoke proper Spanish fluently.
Thus, one of the primary things we got was Spanish, *before* Spanish was a pandering move to the illegal invaders. The vocabulary and grammar I was taught then has stuck with me flawlessly, and one of my high school teachers who’d also lived in Spain was astonished at how proper my accent and pronunciation were, compared to most who by then had been ruined with Mexican gabbling. He could always tell who she’d taught, and as far as I know he never guessed wrong, either.
Same teacher had a computer we could learn on back when that was extremely uncommon, and a giant shelf of books aimed at all literacy levels and genres; everything from actual children’s books about various jobs to “The Hobbit” and such.
She was forced out of the elementary level in favor of a slavish list follower by the time I was in fourth grade, and the classes became much less interesting until middle school. Guess who was teaching there? :-)
If everyone had the exposure to a second language the way I did, I really have little doubt there would be more fluency and less trepidation about the process. Doesn’t matter what language, as long as the person teaching is actually fluent and comfortable with it, preferably with a good accent also.
I was also reading before I was in school, and comfortable reading books geared for adults by second grade or so. Occasionally I had to have a foreign, dialect, or niche word explained to me, if I couldn’t look them up, but generally got by pretty well and reading has stayed a lifelong pleasure to me.