OK, so I was reading about this recently. I am in the same boat as you. I’m 44, graduated in 1999, and grew up in a wealthy area outside of NYC, went to a really good public school district and immediately went to a great university. Our HS graduation and college acceptance rate was like 100%. Everyone was expected to attend a top college. And we all did.

Pretty much everyone had a computer or 2 at home since the 80s, plus their parents typewriters. I learned to code before the age of 10, played lots of science games, knew my way around the keyboard and played Mavis Beacon a few times, but wasn’t really typing. Just plunking. We had the best computers in school starting in the 80s, played oregon trail, the whole 9. But, there was never a mandatory typing class nor did one exist. It had been phased out.

Here’s why. In the 90s, in many wealthy school districts and private schools where attending college was the priority, typing was no longer taught as a class. It was still seen as a vocational or a secretarial skill. We were living in a transitional time, and a lot of schools wanted to distance themselves from those things. So instead kids were taking AP and Honors classes, doing extracurricular activities, etc. Typing, Home Ec, Shop class were all phased out by the early-mid 90s for districts like ours.

I remember taking a required home ec class with girls in middle school, and the boys took a required shop class. That was maybe 1991 or 1992. But I think we were the last grade to ever do it. The schools also knew that most families had computers at home, so it was pretty much expected that we’d learn computer stuff or typing there.

Then in districts that had more vocational-focused towns, farther away from cities, or near smaller cities or inland, require typing classes for a lot longer. Those school districts didn’t assume that every student was headed to college, so they kept practical classes because those were actual job skills for kids that didn’t go to college right after graduating high school.

That’s why a lot of people our age from “good districts” never really learned to type or type well until we started using Instant Messenger and writing emails in college.