In my view, cursive suffers from a similar problem as other signs of "high" culture in general, like basic knowledge of classical languages (Greek and Latin) or literature. In the past, learning these things played two real roles; 1) in a time when official documents were kept by hand, being conditioned to write and read well was a highly valued skill, and 2) it was a mark of status of an educated and cultured person to know these things (it functioned as a social indicator of character; in that sense Eris' "proof" is not so far off the mark).
Nowadays, with the advent of word processors and electronic dictionaries, the importance of 1) had diminished (it's probably far more useful in the real world to teach students how to blind-type), and with the rise of a modernized "mass culture" in which a majority of the population are college-educated, the sort of class-ism implicit in 2) is rather out-dated. In our day and age, being able to write in impeccable copperplate is about as "useful" as being able to quote a line from Catullus (of course, whether it's a good thing that one can do it is another matter entirely).
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