In November 1987, Peter Lewis reviewed a new typing program for The New York Times and admitted he was a two-finger, hunt-and-peck holdout who had quit his high school typing class because he was going to be a physicist. He liked the software anyway. It tracked each student separately, figured out which letters they kept missing, and rebuilt the next lesson around the weak spots. At one point it interrupted him mid-drill: "You're making a lot of mistakes in a row. It may be that you're frustrated or just pounding the keyboard. Let's take a break and try something different." His own teacher, he wrote, would have rapped his knuckles with a ruler.

The program was Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing, $39.95 on 5¼-inch floppies. Mavis herself was a photograph of a Haitian-born model named Renée L'Esperance, discovered at a Saks cosmetics counter in Beverly Hills, a fact that took years to sink in. By 1998 the company had sold six million copies, teachers were calling to ask where she was teaching these days, and the adaptive drills Lewis admired had a trademark: Adaptive Response Technology. Personalized software that watches how a student works and adjusts. Nearly four decades ago, teaching kids where to put their fingers.

That's the skill that has since disappeared from school. Chase DiBenedetto's piece in Mashable today traces the decline: a 2004 Department of Education study found typing classes already on the way out, and in 2011 the Oberlin professor Annie Trubek wrote that "in our era of keyboard ubiquity, typing has fallen out of the curriculum," with educators "letting the ad hoc habits of six-year old computer gamers stand." An EdWeek Research Center survey in 2024 found 69 percent of districts still teach keyboarding formally, wealthier ones earlier. Utah was one of the last states to write hand placement into its standards; it passed a law in March requiring a "modernization." A California Department of Education spokesperson told Mashable the state doesn't test or measure keyboarding, and its next revision will follow Governor Newsom's executive order on AI in schools. Where there was once basic computer science, there is now "AI literacy."

Sarah Levine, who directs the Stanford Teacher Education Program, told Mashable that typing with automaticity matters for the same reason handwriting fluency does: writing is a mode of thinking, and "you have to know your keyboard pretty well, and then you're off and running." Thomas Herman of the National Council for Geographic Education made a version of the same point to K-12 Dive about maps: everything can be looked up after you've formulated the question, and you won't formulate a good one without the mental map underneath it.

Mavis, for what it's worth, is still for sale. An annual license runs $29.99.

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