Interesting story in Time - handwriting is a vanishing skill. Between computers and handhelds (iPhones, Blackberries, etc), there's just not much call for it anymore:

People born after 1980 tend to have a distinctive style of handwriting: a little bit sloppy, a little bit childish and almost never in cursive. The knee-jerk explanation is that computers are responsible for our increasingly illegible scrawl, Steve Graham, a special-education and literacy professor at Vanderbilt University, says that's not the case. The simple fact is that kids haven't learned to write neatly because no one has forced them to. "Writing is just not part of the national agenda anymore," he says.

It's not really taught because, by and large, it's not really needed. Other than scratching out notes to myself, I can't recall the last time I wrote something longhand that was intended for someone else...