Ex Nihilo
Puritan Board Senior
I was just reading Orwell on penmanship today. He thought that learning cursive was essential. According to him, learning to write well involves learning how to draw (a thing I never did, and so my handwriting is illegible to most), and he calls as evidence that all the Chinese and Japanese who could write (this was 1949) wrote more or less gracefully.
A Beka teaches kids cursive before printing, on the theory that it is faster and more natural.
It's certainly easier on the hand, especially if the script is properly slanted. I'm not sure why, but when I was learning to write cursive in school, all the girls thought it was cute to write with a round, upright script. Several hours of writing this way kills the hand!