GEN Z NEVER LEARNED TO READ CURSIVE How will they interpret the past?
The Atlantic: Gen Z Never Learned to Read Cursive.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/10/gen-z-handwriting-teaching-cursive-history/671246/
It was a good book, the student told the 14 others in the undergraduate seminar I was teaching, and it included a number of excellent illustrations, such as photographs of relevant Civil War manuscripts. But, he continued, those weren’t very helpful to him, because of course he couldn’t read cursive.
Had I heard him correctly? Who else can’t read cursive? I asked the class. The answer: about two-thirds. And who can’t write it? Even more. What did they do about signatures? They had invented them by combining vestiges of whatever cursive instruction they may have had with creative squiggles and flourishes. Amused by my astonishment, the students offered reflections about the place—or absence—of handwriting in their lives. Instead of the Civil War past, we found ourselves exploring a different set of historical changes. In my ignorance, I became their pupil as well as a kind of historical artifact, a Rip van Winkle confronting a transformed world.
In 2010, cursive was omitted from the new national Common Core standards for K–12 education. The students in my class, and their peers, were then somewhere in elementary school. Handwriting instruction had already been declining as laptops and tablets and lessons in “keyboarding” assumed an ever more prominent place in the classroom. Most of my students remembered getting no more than a year or so of somewhat desultory cursive training, which was often pushed aside by a growing emphasis on “teaching to the test.” Now in college, they represent the vanguard of a cursiveless world.
Although I was unaware of it at the time, the 2010 Common Core policy on cursive had generated an uproar. Jeremiads about the impending decline of civilization appeared in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and elsewhere. Defenders of script argued variously that knowledge of cursive was “a basic right,” a key connection between hand and brain, an essential form of self-discipline, and a fundamental expression of identity. Its disappearance would represent a craven submission to “the tyranny of ‘relevance.’ ”
In the future, cursive will have to be taught to scholars the way Elizabethan secretary hand or paleography is today.
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Seems to my memory, we spent a fair bit of time on this subject in third grade.
So is this where we switched over to Satan worship and LGBTQ indoctrination? 
When I taught as a grad student TA, we taught that history is learned from primary sources.
Some of those sources are transcribed into typeface but how do you know that the transcription is correct?
Seriously.
If all you had was a transcription of the US Constitution, how do you know what it says is actually what the Constitution says?
I admit that the Constitution is so widely read it is not the best example but how about the separation of Church and State?
It supposedly appears in a letter between Thomas Jefferson and Danbury Baptists.
Can you prove that it does?
You can find a scan of the original document:
https://www.loc.gov/item/mtjbib010955/
https://www.loc.gov/resource/mtj1.025_0557_0558/?sp=2
But if you can't read cursive, how can you determine if it does or does not.
While you might think "That only applies to history"...
How about physics?
Albert Einstein's lab/experimental notebooks are written in cursive
Or, suppose you are digging thru the archives in Istanbul and trip across this:
(and assuming you can read classic Arabic)
It is in an archive...but is it important? (it is, it is an early Arab treatise on cryptography)
Losing this skill would be a disaster and Orwell warned about this:
Don’t crash, and you get rid of all elderly practitioners, “youngsters” had better know how to read cursive. And poor cursive at that.
When a hospital computer system crashes, standard protocol requires use of plain paper, printed forms with spaces for answers, and writing implements. Those forms need to be read in order for the hospital to function.
Sometimes computers being “down” is not due to a failure. It can be due to a hack or an intentional “shut down” to avoid said hack.
Bottom line, health care workers up and down the hierarchy will need to know cursive and LEGIBLE writing. Both reading and writing it. Printing quickly (everything in medicine needs to be done quickly) can often devolve into illegible scribble. Better to learn cursive to start with.
And all this time I thought mail was delivered by address. 
in class for my cursive. That same year my dad opened a business and required all work orders
to be printed, probably because of his sloppy cursive. Before I knew it I was printing more at my
dad's shop than I was writing at school or homework.
As a freshman in high school I was the only one printing in my class, one teacher even asked me
if I knew how to write (thinking I was stupid I believe) informed him of my history and dad's
requirements at the shop and just got out of the habit, now printing felt faster and easier to me.
He said that was fine, whatever I was comfortable with but suggested I slow down just a
little bit when printing because it looked like a hybrid between the 2.
Slowed down for awhile in his class but went back to "speed printing"
And today I'm a graduate of Oxford.
along with my buddy Jethro Bodine. 
got ya
It's from 1850 in Mexico.
Mexico did not start using "forms" until very recently. (After 1930..my uncle was born there in 1925 and his civil birth registration is written out in paragraphs..ugh)
However, there are facebook groups dedicated to deciphering old documents! They have specialists in those groups.
