In Romania, in 1961, when I started 1st grade, we started by learning cursive. There were no ball point pens; but there was an inkwell shared by every two students and a metal nib pen that you had to dip in the inkwell every other word. Using these implements, we had to learn more than cursive: we had to learn calligraphy. Every upstroke was thin; every downstroke was thick. There was to writing a rhythm and a flow. It was not just a matter of learning to write; it was a matter of learning to write beautifully.
So there is this about learning to write cursive: it imprints upon the mind and the body the notion that beauty matters and that it is part and parcel of writing. Long before one is able to write anything interesting or beautiful, when one is barely stuttering writing-wise, it is possible to put some form of beauty in writing. This is very important.
The question of efficiency is more complicated. I have earned my living as a professional writer for all of my adult life, and I grant that being able to write on the computer, unconcerned with mistakes, is liberating. It was wonderful to write the final draft of my dissertation (especially footnotes) on a computer; it is also wonderful to write programming books and technical manuals on a computer because they require hundreds of revisions, and having to do that on a typewriter, or by hand, would be utter hell. On the other hand, both for my dissertation and for writing conceptual material that has to be pellucid and flowing, it was best to do the first draft long hand, because it is the easiest way to slow down and give my writing the voice that makes the reader trust me.
Losing the fear of making a mistake is a great thing when writing is a chore; but not such a good thing when the matter of writing needs to percolate and steep and get to the point where the voice in your head starts dictating the words you need to take down. When you know that mistakes matter, or rather when you know that the stakes are high, you don't start before you're ready. Of course, even then, there will be revisions, but they will be revisions of something that is whole.
I have on my bathroom wall a copy of a manuscript page from Tolstoy's "Resurrection," his last book. Every single line is crossed out and rewritten. I keep it there to remind myself how much work writing is, even for Tolstoy, even on his last book. Some time from now, when writers are all churning out stuff on the computer, there will be no more manuscript pages like that. Oh, I know that there are programs that let you see deletions and updates and edits, but it won't be the same. Scholars might care, assuming the electronic evidence remains, but no one will be framing those pages and putting them up on a wall.
Because there is also this, that handwriting is a picture of a person; it conveys information beyond the meaning of the words. There are promises in it that typeface can't make.
I'll stop here.
Joanna