Congratulations to Emily and her daughter. Handwriting is important and still necessary, but my feeling is that even more necessary from an economic perspective is making comprehensive typing instruction available to ALL students. Many public schools don't have the computers or software necessary to train their students to type properly. A lot of my friends graduated from high school without the ability to touch type. I think that's a serious problem, though not as wide-spread as the handwriting difficulty.

As to handwriting, I was trained with the Palmer method straight through sixth grade. The old lady teacher I had retired the year I moved on to middle school, and she was a lone hold-out. I recall grumbling that she was the only teacher in the whole school who required all assignments to be handed in in cursive (anything handed in in print was handed back).