According to the article "Finland: Typing takes over as handwriting lessons end" (2014), despite concerns such as a possible "disadvantage [to] children who don't have a computer at home" and an adverse impact on the development of "fine motor skills and brain function" in children, Finland's National Board of Education has decided to replace compulsory cursive writing with typing from 2016.
Although I've never studied palaeography, I've always enjoyed looking on and trying to read our most ancient copies of texts from the past, painstakingly written on papyrus, lambskin, paper or other material by scribes working away to reproduce the ideas of Homer, of Plato, of Lucretius, of Confucius, of Mengtzu and so on for later generations. Not being a palaeographer, my ability to decipher even very old English texts isn't that great, but the texts are often as beautiful to look as their ideas are foundational to the cultures they are a part of.
Despite agreeing that handwriting is a skill of rapidly decreasing value in today's world, I felt a twinge of regret that something that has been taught as a basic skill for students for more than 2,000 years in cultures from China to Rome might now be on the way out. But then I thought about my own habits: apart from scribbling on whiteboards at AUA, I almost never write by hand these days - except to fill out forms at banks and for Thai Immigration. In fact, my annual visa and work permit renewal is almost the only time I ever sign my name these past ten years or so! This worries our personnel officer, because my ability to reproduce my own signature as on my passport (written once every ten years) gets a bit rusty between the annual splurge when I sign it about a hundred times at once - an effort that also puts a strain on the muscles involved, which are clearly a different set to those used when I type, as I'm doing now.
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I also learned calligraphy to improve my handwriting, but still people who see my handwriting laugh. During my schooldays, I was very stressful from other's reaction to my handwriting. I have believed the skill is genetic because all my family have similar problems. I'm so happy that recent note taking skill depends on computer typings, but also shocked at the scene that my daughter is typing to meomrise something instead of writing.
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