Folks interested in the history should read Rosemary Sassoon’s book Handwriting of the Twentieth Century. It mainly focuses on England, but is quite comprehensive and America and other countries writing in Latin scripts are also discussed.

(a) The particular “cursive” styles taught in American schools are often pretty crappy and overly ornate and slow/difficult to write, evolving out of writing which was intentionally slow for the sake of uniformity, ornament, and legibility, because it dated from an era when all business communication was handwritten, later simplified so that it would be easier for children. It also was originally designed for quills or dip pens, which are pretty much never used today. Students are seldom taught that the writing style appropriate for a 6-year-old student just learning to hold a pen is probably not appropriate for a 10-year-old or a 15-year-old student.

(b) No instruction in handwriting should rigidly force students to all exactly follow the model instead of allowing for individual variation and comfort. In particular left-handed students need very different instruction than right-handed students, but everyone has individual anatomy and preferences. Much of the handwriting teaching materials from decades past was aimed as much at enforcing discipline and punishing unruly students as at writing per se.

(c) The most important aspects of teaching handwriting are to teach a comfortable posture, help students find a comfortable pen/pencil grip, and help students learn to produce writing which is fluid and legible and fast enough, without too many strokes per letter and without too many awkward movements, but also which matches the student’s own personal style.

(d) What type of pen students learn to write with makes a big difference. #2 pencils and ballpoint pens are not very good tools for learning to write, IMO.

But with that said, teaching “print” writing (i.e. strictly separated letters that look like printed letters – usually except for a and g, which are more like upright versions of italic letters) is pretty stupid. It’s slow, usually devolves into something uncomfortable and illegible in adulthood, is typically not taught in a way such that students understand where the beginnings and ends of strokes for letters should be or have a sense of the logical construction of their letters, and usually isn’t taught any better than joined-together writing styles. (For example: I was never really taught handwriting, and we were mainly encouraged to write with a strictly separated letter style. My pen grip was uncomfortable and my writing was slow and not terribly legible all the way through school. After every long written high-school exam my hand would hurt. Some judicious instruction and better practice at age 5–8 could have saved a lot of grief.)

There are a wide variety of efficient and legible handwriting styles based on italic or cursive writing. Students should aim for joining letters together in groups of 2–4, putting joins and breaks where comfortable (not strictly joining every letter, or strictly separating every letter). Students should be allowed to tweak whatever writing style they are taught by their personal preferences, and not graded or punished on how strictly they can follow the model. Handwriting teachers need to have great powers of observation and great empathy, to see what kinds of posture, pen grips, letter forms, etc. are working for students vs. which ones are causing problems which will plague the students throughout their lives.