What was the point of learning cursive in school?

[skinsguy]

You have to remember, a lot of historical documents were written in cursive, so it's still important to at least teach kids how to read in cursive. They may find reading these documents would be like trying to read something in a foreign language.

It has also been proven that children with learning disabilities or certain intellectual disabilities, such as Down Syndrome, have benefited greatly from learning to write in cursive. The cursive writing seems to help develop fine motor skills, and has helped those children to understand better how words are formed (since cursive letters are written together) than writing individual letters.

Even though I am in Computer Information systems, I would never want to be a slave to the technology - and I think we are starting to teach ourselves and our children to be just that. That is why I don't buy the excuse that we're doing more and more "writing" on computers which makes cursive obsolete. What about writing signatures? While, yes, we don't always use perfect cursive to write our signatures, cursive does help to establish our identities when it comes to our signatures. It's a heck of a lot easier to copy someone's signature that is written mostly in print than it is a cursive signature. Even though we might be moving into the point of replacing hand written signatures with passwords and thumb prints, you still have to fall back to the good ol' fashion hand-written stuff if your computer system goes down.

So, I'd say even though cursive may not be as important to learn as say math or science, it still serves a very useful purpose in our society.