This Washington Post lament over the decline of cursive instruction aside, I'm hard-pressed to come up with a subject nearly as useless as script writing. In elementary school, stylized penmanship was a big deal. By high school, the teachers had asked that I stopped using it because it was harder to read. Glad I learned that. And while some cognitive scientists are arguing that kids who write in cursive show increased aptitude for long, complex essays, I'd like to see some studies (which there may well be -- I just haven't seen any) that disaggregate script from other factors like race, income, and ability that make a kid more likely to learn and write in cursive. Correlation, causation, and all that.
In any case, the decline of cursive seems inevitable and healthy. Class time is finite, and it's hard to make the case that much of the time that used to go to penmanship shouldn't now be spent on typing. And I say that as a student who can write in cursive but still hunt-and-pecks on the keyboard. I do it at 80-some words a minute, but still.
