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So is the second-largest.
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Everyone under the age of 40 reading this:
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Come on! It will be like knowing a secret code!
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Why?
- I got kids in high school whose signatures look worse than mine did when I was seven.
- Paper and pen is everywhere, anywhere, anytime.
- The studies are highly mixed, many poorly done as undergrad projects, but some of those indicate better retention in lectures with handwritten notes.
- Ontario
's Minister of Education is a poli-sci grad with zero time at the front of a classroom and who will throw just about any idea at the wall if he thinks it will stick with “the base”, regardless of merit. (He was all gung-ho for on-line schooling as an excuse to “cut costs”, at least until the entire province was forced to try it during COVID lockdown, and “the base” hated it.)
IMHO there’s something to be said for the pace that handwriting enforces on thought. (I mean, witness all the lunacy I come up with when I’m typing… 
)
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Cursive isn’t the same thing as handwriting. You can do tests and assignments with printing, and in my experience those have the advantage that another human being has a chance of reading them afterward.
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My grandmother had beautiful cursive handwritten script, my mother’s was a bit less floral, but very neat, but mine is chicken scratch on a good day. Then again, I never got rapped aross the knuckles for writing untidily.
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I did, and mine is atrocious.
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Yup. My cursive has always been awful, but people always tell me how much they enjoy my personal style of printing I’ve used ever since the latter end of grade school, which is block printing in all caps, but the capital letters are bigger. 
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Cursive is an anachronism from the time when folk used fountain pens and inkwells. The pen tip wouldn’t reliably lift off the paper and left streaks of ink with each movement. Cursive was a way to add consistency to these movements so that the ink splodges in everyone’s handwriting looked similar, improving overall legibility.
Then ballpoint pens came along and changed the game. You no longer left ink splodges with each movement so there was no need to do the cursive movements. In fact doing cursive with a ballpoint pen is harder because you have to press the pen continually.
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See, this is why history is a good thing to learn… and not just the BS nation-state based historical narratives we often learn from grade school. Like, how many things do we do that are holdovers from older periods that we might not need in modern society often has historical roots that can help us understand “why”…
I don’t know, with your excellent historical context in mind, the whole “make the kids learn cursive” seems like one of those “let’s go back to learning greek and latin and studying classical literature and nothing much else” things… Like, it’s always better to know more stuff for it’s own sake, but at the same time, does it make sense to learn those things at the expense of other things?
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Cross-posting about the global immigration crisis, disparities in media coverage based on class, and the impact on public opinion/political will:
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