The importance of printing and cursive writing

I was watching the news the other day and I discovered something most disheartening in this intellectual, technical age.  Did you know that your child is no longer being taught to print?  Yes, they are being taught keyboarding skills, but, they are not being taught to print.  Oh yes and cursive writing has gone by the wayside a while back.  What the hell!!!
Yes, I mean What the hell, not WTH or the ever popular WTF, and thanks is not spelled thx.  I cringe when I think about what we are doing to our language skills.  The very act of learing to print and write helps us study art, or is art going by the wayside as well.  My God, are we going to be sketching on a computer and getting the computer to copy the colours so it can be perfect, or will  photographs replace art. 
I'm completely boggled, I do not know what to say.  I mean come on, is it too late to bring back printing and writing.  Or is that going to become something that we have to get tutors for our kids in the future.  I just want to shake someone, this can't be correct, but it is.  Are we going to follow the path of Farenheit 451.  I know that progress demands we move on, but I feel this move is in the wrong direction.
Crafting, writing, reading, sewing, cooking, gardening, these are all a big part of my life.  I don't know that being unable to write using pen and paper is something we can do.  I just can't see why we would want to loose such an important part of expressing ourselves.  If so, there would not be so many alphabets, so many written languages. I'm going off to growl in my room and think.  I believe that something needs to be done about this!!!
Ahhhh!, but one more thing before I go, we move forward until we can't move forward any longer, and what happens when technology breaks down and we have to go back to basics.  That is something we may one day have to face.  I have had a full life, built houses, made furniture, sewed, cooked cleaned, created things, ridden horses and many other old fashioned skills that are no longer really taught, just handed down.  I have written instructions on how to do a lot of things.  This may one day be important, let's just hope they don't get rid of reading.  Although one would think if reading is gotten rid of there would be no more need for schools.
I must stop thinking about this, it's burdoning my soul.