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When I was in the 1st and 2nd grades, back in the early 70's, I kept asking my teacher why we needed to learn cursive. I was very confused, because we were reading in print. Apparently it became a problem, and the school called my parents for a conference. My mother told me afterwards that I had to learn it because I needed to learn how to sign my name and read other people's names. I stopped being a pain about it and did the lessons, and of course I eventually learned how to write.
After the 11th grade, however, none of my papers were allowed to be written. As college prep, they were to be typewritten. It worked for me, as I had just inputted a program (found in a magazine) in BASIC for my Commodore 64 that was a basic word processor. Between that and my old Smith-Corona, the cursive style was relegated to the back seat. In college, nothing was handwritten, ever. So, since 1984, I have only used the cursive style to write my name, and that only in legal or formal situations.
The only time I need to read cursive handwriting is when someone of my parents generation or older sends me a letter or a postcard, or when I am looking at another persons signature. As a result, I have - for all intents and purposes - forgotten how to write many of the letters of the English alphabet in cursive. I tested myself once, and discovered that it took me close to a minute to write a few simple sentences in cursive!
As you can probably tell, I fully support phasing out this outmoded format. There have been other handwriting scripts in the past, and society has moved past them as time and progress changed our modes of communication. This is really no different in my opinion.
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