I Have to disagree with all of you that think there is no reason for beautiful cursive.
Think about a sympathy card printed by a machine instead of hand written by someone who cares? When I get cards from people that have printed them out on their computer I feel they don't care enough to hand write it, rather than just pushing a button.
I think cursive teaches eye hand coordination, that will in time help those kids to type better. every engineer I know has great hand writing, their grammar sucks
My wife sends me notes sometimes, if they were printed they wouldn't have the same effect.
Ever notice that people that have a lot of education tend to have terrible handwriting, just an aside I just thought of
I love seeing nice handwriting, I think it shows a special type of sophistication, by the way mine sucks
I fear that if we allow them to remove things like teaching cursive in schools it will lead to other things like writing anything by hand, because every kid has a computer and can print out anything they want. Spelling, why learn that, there's spellcheck. Maths, they can use a calculator. Physical education what's the point, they have all become fat little monsters that don't walk anywhere because their parents have that over priced SUV (with the baby seal skin seat covers and extinct whale hub caps).
There are many things that were taught in my day that they don't teach now, some are because the tech isn't needed now (Slide rule) but the problem solving is lost, some because they don't believe kids need to know, but kids today never learn to solve things, the answers are all given to them and they learn to memorize everything.
I don't really know if cursive is that important, I rarely use it, but what will they teach instead?