Isn't handwriting just the activity of writing by hand as opposed to typing a keyboard? Whether it's cursive or block/print, as long as it's written by hand it still has benefits. Many studies link handwriting to better brain connectivity and learning compared to typing.
The act of writing is the one that brings the benefits, not the looks of the result. I don't see a drawback to learning to write by hand even if nobody will ever read it or if it doesn't look good.
Let’s be honest with ourselves here. Children are tortured in school through forced and constant rote memorisation and this makes most of them hate learning anything in later life.
I feel that your viewpoint on this is that of a naive beta bucks provider’s view of school. Childrens spirit is actually broken , school is a training program in as much so that they accept a life as cogs in the machine. The hours are unnecessarily long , they are forcefully socialised and manipulated to care about what people think of them with praise and shaming tactics (gold stars , 30 sets of eyes on them all day etc.).
In this hellish environment which they will be arrested if they do not submit to and attend - they must submit to authority all day and work. Wear a work uniform. Follow work hours. Do work that could easily be compressed to 1-3 hours per day if it was necessary. But the work they do is about conditioning and breaking them so it is not compressed it is stretched out as far as possible with all sorts of justifications (the parents can’t mind them during these hours because they themselves are trapped in this situation too). The children must also hope that whatever older cog is paid to abuse and manipulate them wont punish them with more home work. This squanders and contaminates the best years of their lives.
I love computer programming and working hard. However it’s undeniable to me that school as it currently exists is not anything close to what your post makes it out to be. I would be extremely hesitant about having children in the future - if they are going to be forced to suffer as I did in school.
This is one reason why I employ the Scriptorium language learning technique developed by Alexander Arguelles which focuses you on actively engaging with a text by reading it aloud, carefully writing it down while saying each word, and then rereading the written text aloud. I try my best to keep my my cursive consistent and looking nice, but despite my best efforts[0] it still gets a bit scraggly at times.
Writing by hand teaches fine motor skills that can bd transferred later to other tasks. When I was in school, we learned not only block print and cursive but also half-uncial script. Nobody expected us to get jobs copying medieval manuscripts: we learned better how to control our fingers and wrists.
The same goes for playing recorders or simple musical instruments: you don't teach that to kids hoping that they'll get jobs playing the recorder, but so that they learn finger control and maybe, if you're lucky, something about music.
People who think that early childhood education is job training probably don't have kids. Educating kids is not about direct utility but about cultivating muscles and thoughts and habits that lead to other development later. The word "cultivation" is an agricultural term that describes tilling the soil: that doesn't actually grow crops (it happens prior to planting), but it makes the growing season to come much more productive than simply casting seed on the unbroken earth. Education is the cultivation of human potential before adulthood, preparing the child for a richer adulthood in ways that are not obviously utilitarian.