As a nearly 42-year-old American, I fully agree with you. In particular:
> That future generations are cut off from old writings is nonsense.
Some of us are cut off anyway, until the writing is either OCR'd or manually transcribed. I'm legally blind (though with some usable vision), and some of my friends are totally blind. I can read handwriting if it's magnified enough, or large enough to begin with, but my skill for deciphering handwriting has faded due to disuse. It's very rarely a problem anymore.
Some of my least happy memories from elementary school are of learning to handwrite. My teachers quite reasonably thought that I would be better off if I learned to make maximal use of the vision I have. It made sense at the time (the 80s and early 90s); if I had only been proficient at writing in Braille or on a computer, I would have had no way to write something in-class that could then be immediately read by my sighted teachers and peers (unless I used the one classroom computer, as I sometimes did). But now I wish I had started learning Braille in first grade, and that they had made me keep using it even when I thought I didn't need it. And these days, any low-vision kid shouldn't have to waste any time at all learning to handwrite. Honestly, I wish they'd quit teaching sighted kids to handwrite too, so future generations wouldn't produce any more text that's inaccessible to us. But I suppose that's too extreme.
> That future generations are cut off from old writings is nonsense.
Some of us are cut off anyway, until the writing is either OCR'd or manually transcribed. I'm legally blind (though with some usable vision), and some of my friends are totally blind. I can read handwriting if it's magnified enough, or large enough to begin with, but my skill for deciphering handwriting has faded due to disuse. It's very rarely a problem anymore.
Some of my least happy memories from elementary school are of learning to handwrite. My teachers quite reasonably thought that I would be better off if I learned to make maximal use of the vision I have. It made sense at the time (the 80s and early 90s); if I had only been proficient at writing in Braille or on a computer, I would have had no way to write something in-class that could then be immediately read by my sighted teachers and peers (unless I used the one classroom computer, as I sometimes did). But now I wish I had started learning Braille in first grade, and that they had made me keep using it even when I thought I didn't need it. And these days, any low-vision kid shouldn't have to waste any time at all learning to handwrite. Honestly, I wish they'd quit teaching sighted kids to handwrite too, so future generations wouldn't produce any more text that's inaccessible to us. But I suppose that's too extreme.