You must master cursive or you'll never manage in adult life

What actually happened

The removal was not really a judgement that cursive is worthless. It was a time-allocation decision: the school day is fixed, keyboard fluency became the higher-value skill, and something had to give. Many districts cut the several hours a week that penmanship drills had consumed since the Palmer Method.

The backlash produced real arguments on both sides. Cursive advocates point to research on handwriting and letter recognition, motor memory, and the practical problem that students who never learned it cannot read historical documents or their grandparents' letters. Skeptics note that the strongest handwriting research concerns handwriting generally, print included, rather than cursive specifically. California's AB 446 restored a mandate for grades one through six starting in 2024, and roughly half the states now require some cursive instruction.

So this is a case where the curriculum swung and partially swung back, which is worth flagging honestly rather than presenting as a clean defeat. But if you were taught that adult life would be impossible without a fluid joined hand, the last twenty years have not supported that.