Way to complete and deliberately miss the point. Let’s look at some of those sentences you deliberately skipped:
Evaporating skills are not society getting dumb, they’re society moving on. There’s other skills we’ve had to learn in the new modern world.
So of course I don’t have those skills you listed entirely to be argumentative, because our society has moved on. But I have other skills, like installing an OS and then using it, because those are the skills needed in a modern society. Every time somebody lists skills off that we no longer have they carefully ignore the fact that we don’t need them anymore either. Necessary skills don’t fade from the societal set, the skills that fade are the useless ones. Like cursive.
We know that eventually someone will work out a "remote" that allows us to think to control and we'll dispense with keyboards and control units.
I would imagine such a device will allow us to write in whatever cursive we need. I will use German script of the early 1800s ~ even people of that time were unable to read it well.
Cursive handwriting is a simple skill that is quickly learned by children. If coupled with another school activity it doesn't need to take time from other subjects. My homeschoolers learned cursive and they were learning to read and they used it when practicing the spelling words. Writing words out manually helps in memorization.
I simply don't see this as an “either learn this skill but not that” type of situation.
Finally....When I ask people who are dead set against teaching cursive to children, I find that they never fully mastered the skill. It was a source of frustration for them in school because they were IMPROPERLY taught the wrong strokes in printing and they very understandably had a very hard time reversing the direction of the strokes in cursive.
Given the extremely **minimal** amount of time it takes to teach children cursive ( if done properly when children are first learning to print), it is worth the **minor** amount of effort. It is nice skill, and many see it as a sign of refinement and education. Now how could that hurt on the job or anywhere else in life?
By the way....Knowing a little bit of calligraphy is sometimes useful as well!
You’re 100% correct. I had a friend that was constantly pushing some 19th century high school test as some sort of proof that they were so much more educated in that century. I did rather poorly, but only because 2/3 of the test centered around agrarian units of measure that I’ve never had any reason to learn. He just didn’t get that the test didn’t actually represent a higher level of knowledge, just outdated knowledge.