9 Things We Learned in School That Kids Are Not Taught Anymore: The Deep Dive
October 24, 2026 — 65Nation
Think back to a school day in the 1960s. First period, you hunched over a manual typewriter with a cover taped over the keys. Later, you hemmed a skirt in home ec or squared up a piece of pine in shop. In gym, the teacher put on a fiddle record and told you to swing your partner. On the way home you stopped at the library and pulled open a little wooden drawer to find a book.
Here is something worth knowing: almost none of that happens in an American classroom today. Some of it was replaced by something better. Some of it simply slipped away. And one piece, as you will see, is on its way back.
This week this list drew more readers than anything else we published. So we went back to all nine and dug deeper: who started each one, what ended it, and what, if anything, has taken its place.
1. Typing Class
The room clattered like a hailstorm; the keys were covered so you could not peek, and the manual typewriters had seen a few graduating classes before yours. For decades, typing was one of the most practical electives in the building.
QWERTY dates to the 1870s, and the touch-typing system, home row and all, to the 1890s, so typing class took a 19th-century skill and drilled it into you one covered key at a time.
Then the class itself disappeared. Federal transcript data show that 44 percent of high school graduates in 2000 had taken a keyboarding course. By 2019 it was 2.5 percent. In a 2024 EdWeek Research Center survey, fewer than one in five school leaders said their schools teach keyboarding as a standalone course. The Common Core standards expect a fourth grader to type a full page in one sitting, but leave the how to each district.
Most students now pick it up inside other classes, or on their own, which is why so many of them hunt and peck with two fingers, a method that tends to top out in the mid-30s for words per minute. One wrinkle, though: researchers at Finland’s Aalto University tested everyday typists in 2016 and found that self-taught ones using about six fingers could match trained touch typists for speed. What separated the fast from the slow was keeping the hands still. Anyone who passed Typing II learned that lesson the hard way, with a cover over the keys.
2. Home Economics
Measuring flour, threading a bobbin, balancing a household budget. In 1959, only 1.3 percent of the students in home economics were boys. Girls took home ec, boys took shop, and that was simply how the schedule worked.
It started out as serious science. Ellen Swallow Richards, the first woman admitted to MIT, launched the home economics movement around the turn of the century on the idea that running a household deserved the same rigor as running a laboratory. The Smith-Hughes Act of 1917 put federal money behind it, and by the 1950s nearly every high school in the country offered it. Title IX in 1972 ended the girls-here, boys-there arrangement, at least on paper.
The subject was renamed family and consumer sciences in 1994, and the new name did not stop the slide. A national survey published in the Journal of Family and Consumer Sciences found enrollment fell from 5.5 million students in 2002 to about 3.5 million a decade later, a 38 percent drop. One teacher told NPR that the testing push of the No Child Left Behind years squeezed it off the schedule. Teachers also said they now spend class time explaining how to wash dishes and how to tell a teaspoon from a tablespoon.
One slice of it is coming back under a new name. The budgeting unit has become “personal finance.” Next Gen Personal Finance counts 30 states that now require a standalone personal finance course to graduate, up from eight in 2020. The sewing machines are mostly gone. The checkbook lesson is back.
3. Shop Class
The smell of sawdust. A birdhouse, a bookend, a lamp that mostly worked. Wood shop, metal shop and auto shop were where many of us learned to respect a tool.
The same 1917 law that funded home ec funded shop. The National Center for Education Statistics found the average high school graduate earned 4.2 credits of career and technical coursework in 1990 and 3.6 by 2009. Budget cuts and a shortage of shop teachers did the rest. Once a shop was mothballed, the tools tended to disappear, and bringing one back meant starting from nothing, as one California middle school found when it reopened its woodshop after eight dark years.
The pendulum is swinging. With a wave of electricians, plumbers and machinists heading into retirement, the companies that hire them have started paying for lathes. In March, The Home Depot Foundation announced grants of up to $10,000 for K-12 schools and trade programs to modernize their shop spaces, part of a $50 million push to fill the construction labor gap. Some schools now offer 3D printers and laser cutters alongside the band saw, which is a fine thing. It is just not the same as planing a board by hand.
4. Driver’s Ed in the School’s Car
Remember the sedan with the extra brake pedal on the passenger side, and the nervous teacher who used it? For a generation, learning to drive was something your high school did, usually at no charge.
It began with a grudge. In 1931 a drunk driver hit the parked car of a Penn State professor named Amos Neyhart, and he decided teenagers needed proper instruction. Within a couple of years, he was teaching State College High School students in his own car, and by 1940 the course was part of the required curriculum there. By the 1960s, driver’s ed was everywhere. By one count, enrollment reached 1.3 million students in 1964, with more than 12,000 public schools offering it.
Then came a run of studies in the late 1970s and early 1980s that could not show that students who took driver’s ed had fewer crashes. The largest, in DeKalb County, Georgia, found something worse: students who took the course got licensed sooner, so as a group they were in more crashes, simply because they were on the road earlier. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration dropped driver’s ed from its priority list, the federal money went away, and states followed. California alone went from about 250,000 students getting behind-the-wheel training through public schools in 1990 to 440 students in 2007. The job moved to private driving schools, and the bill moved to parents.
5. The Slide Rule
If you took physics or engineering, you carried one in a leather case and could multiply, divide and pull a square root in seconds. The people who designed bridges, radios and spacecraft did it with the same tool.
Keuffel & Esser of Hoboken, New Jersey, had been making slide rules since 1891, and in the 1960s it was turning out 5,000 a month. Then, in January 1972, Hewlett-Packard introduced the HP-35, the first pocket calculator that could handle trigonometry and logarithms. It cost $395, about $3,000 in today’s dollars, and the company hoped to sell 10,000. It sold 100,000 the first year. Engineers called it the slide rule killer, and colleges began dropping slide rule instruction almost at once.
K&E built its last slide rule on July 11, 1976, and sent it to the Smithsonian. Nothing replaced the slide rule in the classroom. The calculator simply made it unnecessary, and a skill that took weeks to master became a museum piece in under a decade. Not everyone let go: a slide rule society founded in Oregon in 1983 had more than 400 members within four years.
6. The Card Catalog
Every library had one: a wall of small wooden drawers, each packed with typed index cards sorted by author, title and subject. We learned the Dewey Decimal System so we could walk from the drawer to the right shelf.
The man behind the numbers was also behind the drawers. Melvil Dewey, who published his decimal system in the 1870s, pushed libraries toward a standard card of roughly three by five inches, and his supply company sold the oak cabinets to hold them. In 1901 the Library of Congress began selling printed cards to libraries nationwide, so a small-town library could own the same catalog as the biggest one. By the 1960s the Library of Congress’s own catalog ran past nine million cards in 10,500 trays.
The cards did not go quietly. OCLC, the Ohio organization that printed catalog cards for libraries nationwide, was shipping eight tons of them a week at its peak in 1985, the year it printed 131 million. It printed its last cards on October 1, 2015, after more than 1.9 billion in all. Most libraries had gone digital long before then, but that day was the official end.
7. Diagramming Sentences
Subject on the left, verb on the right, a vertical line between them, and the modifiers hanging off at a slant like laundry on a line. Diagramming dates to 1877, when two Brooklyn professors, Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg, argued that students would understand grammar better if they could see it drawn.
They were improving on a stranger idea. An 1847 grammar by Stephen Watkins Clark had students draw sentences as clusters of balloons. Reed and Kellogg flattened the balloons into lines, and their textbook, Higher Lessons in English, became a fixture of American classrooms for the next century. Gertrude Stein, of all people, said nothing she learned in school was more exciting than diagramming, and that once you could truly do it, you knew most of what there was to know about English grammar.
It held on for a century. In 1985, the National Council of Teachers of English declared that repetitive grammar drills got in the way of better writing, and diagramming faded from most classrooms soon after. It never fully died; it survives in some textbooks and lesson plans. Kitty Burns Florey, who learned it from a nun named Sister Bernadette and later wrote a history of the practice, says there are two kinds of people: the ones who loved diagramming and the ones who hated it. Both groups can still do it.
8. Square Dancing in Gym Class
Allemande left. Promenade home. If your gym teacher made you do-si-do to a scratchy record, you can thank Henry Ford. Ford loved old-fashioned dancing and, with a dance master named Benjamin Lovett, began teaching it to Dearborn schoolchildren in 1925. By 1928, close to half the schools in the country had square dancing in physical education.
Ford did nothing by halves. He found Lovett running the dance program at a Massachusetts inn, hired him away and brought him to Michigan. The first Dearborn class, on May 21, 1925, had 16 children. It grew until 22,000 children in the Dearborn area were taking lessons and Ford’s instructors were teaching in 98 schools a week. Ford published a dance manual called “Good Morning” in 1926, had his friend Thomas Edison press square dance records, and built a ballroom at Greenfield Village named Lovett Hall. A Colorado school superintendent named Lloyd “Pappy” Shaw picked up the torch in the 1930s and gathered the western dances Ford had missed into a 1939 book called “Cowboy Dances.”
It stayed on the gym calendar for decades and was eventually named an official state dance in more than 20 states. It has faded from most gym classes since, and for most kids today the do-si-do is something they have never done. It was good exercise, and you learned to look a partner in the eye.
9. Cursive (The One Coming Back)
We spent the third grade looping capital Q’s that looked like the number 2. Then in 2010, the Common Core standards adopted by most states left cursive off the list, and many schools stopped teaching it.
Here is the twist. Parents, teachers and lawmakers pushed back. In 2016, 14 states required cursive. By 2019 it was 20. As of this year, more than 25 do, including California, Florida, Michigan and Pennsylvania, and one handwriting group puts the count above 30.
The science gave them some backup. In 2012, a psychologist at Indiana University named Karin James scanned the brains of five-year-olds who had learned letters three ways: by typing them, by tracing them, and by writing them freehand. Only the children who wrote by hand lit up the regions the brain uses for reading. Later work found that watching an adult write cursive did nothing on its own; the child had to move the pen. Reading a grandparent’s letter, signing your own name, making out the Declaration of Independence: it turns out those still matter, and so does the loop itself. On this one, the kids are catching up to us.
None of this is a knock on today’s schools. Kids are learning things we never did, and some of what we learned belonged to its time. But a generation that can type without looking, hem a pair of pants, find a book in a card catalog and square dance on command has a few skills no longer taught in schools that are still worth keeping. Pass one along this week. Someone younger might even thank you.
