Hence, there will always be a market for people who can write cursive. What I foresee is that young people of today will go to a "handwriting service" and have a custom signature designed for them by a "cursive artist." I can see these cursive artists charging thousands of dollars to customize a signature for somebody and people will be willing to pay for it. After all, that signature will be part of their identity the rest of their lives so likely they will want something very distinctive and fancy, sort of like a "John Hancock" signature. Once the signature is designed, it will be electronically encrypted and only accessible to the person it was designed for. They will then be able to electronically affix the signature to all their documents.
It's probably been 20 years since I wrote anything in cursive other than my own name. In fact, I hardly ever even print either and as a result, my handwriting has gotten so poor that I find myself printing in block letters, otherwise, I won't even be able to read it!
Since the early 1990s, I have been writing primarily on the keyboard.
Looking back on my school years, the most important class I ever took was typing. It wasn't called keyboarding back then because personal computers didn't exist for the most part. I took typing for two years, my sophomore and junior year of high school. The first year, we were taught on the manual typewriters, the kind you had to slap the carriage across with your hand when you wanted to move down a line and if you had to erase something, you carefully applied white-out with a tiny brush and typed over it after it dried. It was so time consuming to make corrections that you just learned to be careful and not make any mistakes at all.
In year two of typing, we moved up to the IBM electric typewriters and to us, those typewriters were like something out of the Jetsons. We felt like we were on the cutting edge of technology with those things! I wanted to buy one for home badly but they were so expensive that they were out of reach for my family's budget at the time. So my parents ended up getting me a manual Royal typewriter at a flea market, this typewriter was built sometime in the 1950s and even today, you can pull it down out of the attic and start using it. That's how solid and well-built it is.
I remember getting a lot of grief from my classmates for taking typing courses. Now this was the 1970s and only women were supposed to know how to type so this was considered a sissy course for a boy to take. I was only one of two boys in the class and I was teased to no end about how I was going to grow up to be somebody's secretary and whatnot.
But I'm glad I went through it because of all the skills I learned in high school, typing ended up being the most useful. I figure my ability to type well (I can even today type around 60 words a minute) has made me hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional income in my career.
I learned to touch-type on my own when I was in college, but never managed to acquire much speed (just enough to be slightly faster than if I wrote by hand). Perhaps I would have done better if I’d taken a formal course.
Knowing how to type has been useful to me because most of my life I’ve worked as a writer. Ordinarily I haven’t needed to type any faster than I can think, though, so not much speed has been required. :-)