The Curse of losing cursive writing

My friend Shannon Bohle has pointed out something in her blog I hadn't thought about. While I deplored the loss of penmanship in school because it taught discipline and precision, she notes that this is leading to an inability to read cursive well, and thus to loss of access of countless documents from Presidential letters to patents and scientific papers. Until the mid-1800s, everything was written in cursive, and we're sliding down a slope toward a world where much of humanity's treasure trove of thought and action will be accessible only to specialists.