In the modern age you don’t need to know cursive to read the founding father’s documents. They’ve been typed hundreds maybe thousands of times, and if that’s not good enough you can always find images of the originals and point your favorite OCR software at them, bang instant printed version.
If you are putting down words, writing, with your hand using pen or paper, it is handwriting.
It’s not a matter of dumbing down society, it’s a matter of taking that time to teach them something that might actually be useful. Cursive is useless, has been useless for at least half a century now, it’s time to admit it and move on. Teach them simple interest and how expected income works so they won’t join in the student loan “crisis”. Grammar and spelling are still useful, spell check has too many limitations. Cursive is not. 3 generations have learned it and stopped using it as soon as they got out of school, society has spoken, we’re done with cursive. The only question is why haven’t the schools bothered to listen.
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Because they don't have to.