Whither cursive?

So the keyboard is killing penmanship, eh? I wasn't too sure of the significance until I read this:

The loss of handwriting also may be a cognitive opportunity missed. The neurological process that directs thought, through fingers, into written symbols is a highly sophisticated one. Several academic studies have found that good handwriting skills at a young age can help children express their thoughts better -- a lifelong benefit. Children who don't learn correct technique find it harder to write by hand, so they avoid it. Schools that do teach handwriting often stop after third grade -- right after kids learn cursive. By the time computers are more widely used in classrooms for writing, perhaps in fourth or fifth grade, many children already have decided they don't like to write.

In one of the studies, Vanderbilt University professor Steve Graham, who studies the acquisition of writing, experimented with a group of first-graders in Prince George's County who could write only 10 to 12 letters per minute. The kids were given 15 minutes of handwriting instruction three times a week. After nine weeks, they had doubled their writing speed and their expressed thoughts were more complex. He also found corresponding increases in their sentence construction skills.

So the standardization of writing via the mechanism of the Qwerty keyboard is dumbing kids down? Then my friends, there is great cause to worry because the alphabetical numeric keypad used for text messaging is already pulverizing our language into a vowel-less mush devoid of any punctuation and full of emoticons. Our future is full of idiots.