There are lots of things I spent a lot of time learning school that I rarely use, but see the value in having learnt. Cursive, beyond a very basic level, is not one of those things.
Though I’m no education expert, perhaps there is a subliminal value to spending all that time.
I learned cursive, then reverted to print, but when I entered a phase of my life where I needed to write several pages a day I quickly went back to (a custom variant of) cursive because it was faster to write in a legible way than print.
When I rush print it quickly becomes illegible. When I rush my cursive it doesn't look quite as nice as it does when I'm writing steadily, but I can still read what I wrote ten years later.
From what I can tell it works because cursive letters are defined in a shape that lends itself to a quick moving pen. Once you learn that shape (both to write and read), you can quickly get words down on a page and then understand them later. If you just try to slur your print in an unprincipled way your letters distort in ways that make them harder to tell apart.
Now, I imagine someone could develop a slurred print that doesn't have connections between letters, but I'd probably call that a cursive anyway.
Later I found out it was developed for use with a fountain pen, designed with the idea that a correctly-faced nib would make some strokes bolder and others very faint, and to keep the nib always moving in a kind of flow to avoid spots, and to make it natural to keep the nib faced the correct way(s), plus with even more attention to avoiding raising the pen than most cursives, for similar reasons of avoiding spotting. That made all the downsides make sense—it's far less ugly and easier to read when written with a fountain pen, and may well be faster than many other similarly-clean methods of writing with one.
Why the hell we were still learning that hand decades into the dominance of the ballpoint, remains a question.
I did nearly all my exams on a computer.
At one point the best writing tool was the fountain pen. It was a great invention and it had an appropriate script: cursive, which was the natural thing to do given how the ink flowed.
However kids are messy and you really want them to use pencils because they don't have flowing ink. The reason for cursive in the first place was the flowing ink, so when we switched away from flowing ink, there was no reason to write in cursive.
Except of course to waste the only resource everybody agrees is okay to waste: kids time.
The time would be far better spent on say personal finance lessons, which people seem to really struggle with. What's a mortgage, what's a loan, what gets taxed, that sort of thing.
What happens if you simply print your statement like most people who need to write legibly do for the majority of their life?
At the end of the day cursive writing is a hobby, not a skill. We don't need it anymore. It wastes priceless learning time at a critical juncture in our intellectual development.
On a more serious note - US removed cursive from their curriculum almost two decades ago - something i cant wrap my head around as cursive is something the rest of the world(?) uses starting in middle school and onwards through the whole adult life.