Long live Mavis Beacon.
If you’re unfamiliar with the name, she was the not-entirely-real icon behind classroom software that taught generations of students touch typing. Beacon was a celebrity of early digital literacy, with generations of learners collectively misremembering her as a real-life elite typer — not just a made-up name attached to the likeness of model Renée L’Esperance.
Still, Beacon became an avatar for the digital dreams of the pre-Y2K generation. The software, full name “Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing,” was an entry point to the world of technology for thousands of children who would later grow into a computer-skilled workforce. Before entering the rat race, though, these students would be required to attend “Computer Lab,” where they would visit typing.com to compete for the highest WPM (“words per minute”).
Now, most kids don’t go to a computer lab. They boot up their personal Chromebooks at their desks, log onto their school’s assignment portal, complete their tasks with help from AI, and go back to their phones or iPads.
Concern about technology’s impact on student learning has reached a critical level. A recent longitudinal study of students aged 7 to 16 found that early adoption of social media negatively impacted kids’ learning outcomes. Child development researchers and safety advocates have called for an end to screen time in classrooms as literacy rates decline. Generative AI is sending everyone spinning.
But the kids are still learning. They’re just not learning the same things their parents did — especially about computers.
WPM? More like words per hour
Mavis Beacon’s memory may live on, but touch typing — or being able to type using just sightless motor memory — has turned into a dying art. A 2024 EdWeek Research Center survey found that just 69 percent of districts teach “keyboarding” in a formal capacity, whether that’s directly in curriculum or as a separate, elective course.
The more affluent the school system, the earlier they introduce keyboarding skills, the survey found.
What those classes are actually teaching is even more of a mystery. Other than surveys, there is little publicly available data on typing proficiency across the country. Directed touch-type curriculum seems to be rare.
The basic skill is often relegated to app-based tools built into classroom devices. Tech-focused lesson plans available online devote less time to basics and more to mastering advanced computer skills and personalized tools like AI assistants.
A problem as old as computers
The shift from basics is not necessarily a new trend. Proper typing became a commonly used benchmark in schools as early as the late ’90s, but by 2004, typing classes were already on their way out, according to a 2004 Department of Education study quoted by the Christian Science Monitor.
Search “touch typing op-eds,” and you will find dozens of complaints that students don’t know how to put hands to keys.
In a 2011 MIT Technology Review article, for example, Oberlin College professor Annie Trubek criticized a rise in “idiosyncratic, personalized hunt-and-peck” typing among younger generations. “Ironically, in our era of keyboard ubiquity, typing has fallen out of the curriculum,” wrote Trubek. “Since most students come to school familiar with keyboards, including cell phone keypads, educators are letting the ad hoc habits of six-year old computer gamers stand.”
A 2015 Wall Street Journal article reported a rising demand for keyboarding classes as digital testing became prevalent under new Common Core State Standards — and teachers realized many kids didn’t know how to type.
On the whole, Americans’ digital literacy skills are declining.
States tiptoe around typing
As newer, faster, more complex technologies enter the world of education, more teachers are calling on their districts to institute basic computer skill requirements like keyboarding long before they have to engage with something like machine learning.
As of 2025, Utah was one of just a few states that still listed motor typing skills — like proper hand placement — as part of their state standard curriculum. When the state’s Board of Education implemented such specific K-5 keyboarding proficiency standards, they deemed them a “critical literacy skill.”
Mashable Light Speed
But Utah could be changing things soon. In a statement to Mashable, state education officials declined to comment on the implementation of keyboarding standards, citing recent legislation. In March, the state passed an amendment to its digital skills curriculum mandating a “modernization” of the standards, including an emphasis on news and media literacy.
While California includes keyboard proficiency in its Common Core standards, a Department of Education spokesperson told Mashable that the state does not “test or measure” the skill at a state level. Schools do not receive a curriculum framework or additional instructional materials beyond what is included in the 2015 Computer Science Standards, the spokesperson explained.
And similar to Utah, California is set to revamp its tech standards soon, aligned with Governor Gavin Newsom’s new executive order on AI in schools. A department spokesperson explained the state’s current standards. Where there was once basic computer science, there is now “AI literacy.”
Hitting Ctrl X on Ctrl C
The keyboard may prove to be a key (pun intended) learning gap for many students whose tech skills are borne from touchscreen devices, like smartphones and iPads.
Complaints about students not knowing basic shortcuts — including classic short keys such as “Ctrl C” for copy and “Ctrl V” for paste — abound on online forums and subreddits r/Teachers and r/AskTeachers.
“One student was completely blown away when I ‘magically’ got his suddenly missing work back by pushing ctrl-z a couple times, and a simple copy-paste final part to a project was so confusing to them,” wrote one first-year high school teacher in a 2020 Reddit post criticizing the “digital native” myth. “All that said, I love every single one of my ridiculous computer-illiterate stinkers. I just wish their prior schools had given them the tools they needed.”
But like many other assumed tech skills, it’s hard to put exact numbers on the problem. Most reporting on the subject cites a 2023 survey of 500 university students in Japan that found that only a third knew the shortcut for undoing a keyboard action. The most familiar shortcut among students was for copying text, with just 62 percent reporting they knew what the combination of keys did. And 20 percent said they didn’t know any short keys at all.
Parents and teachers have opined about other hardware deficiencies among their young learners. For example, anecdotes describe computer mouses, obsolete in an era of trackpads, as a specific speed bump in the road to greater device efficiency.
Now we’re trying to throw AI literacy on top of those gaps and it’s a recipe for disaster.
Computer, put it in the cloud
Personal devices — tablets, phones — as well as sandboxed or app-based learning devices like Chromebooks have created other deficits, too.
“To add insult to injury, they don’t even know how file directories work! The idea there [sic] are different places in computer storage a file can end up is a totally foreign concept,” wrote a frustrated college TA in a Reddit post from 2025.
The streamlined functioning of these tools, built with limited capabilities or reliant on Cloud-based storage, have negated the need for complex file organization and directories that used to be core to learning computer navigation.
In fact, many devices no longer even give you an obvious option to save your files elsewhere. Instead, media is saved right to your camera roll or sent off to cloud storage to live in the ether until you use your digital assistant to recall it on your behalf. Many devices hide file directions to decrease visual clutter.
If you use Google’s suite of word processors and spreadsheet makers — which most students do — everything is saved and shared instantly with teachers and peers to review. No need to even attach a file and send an email these days.
Take the stories from this 2021 Verge article, which cite a cohort of professors who started documenting a decline in file directory knowledge around 2017. “In an age where every conceivable user interface includes a search function, young people have never needed folders or directories for the tasks they do,” the publication wrote.
According to anecdotal stories from IT pros flocking to Reddit to air complaints, nested hierarchies — or organizing documents into a main folder with subfolders — are often too difficult for the average user to figure out, let alone a child still learning their multiplication tables.
Bringing back computer basics
On the whole, Americans’ digital literacy skills are declining.
The 2023 International Computer and Information Literacy Study — a global assessment of students’ ability “to use computers to investigate, create, and communicate in order to participate effectively at home, at school, in the workplace, and in society” — reported a sharp decline in digital literacy among American eighth graders.
“The results highlight the need for further inquiry and concentrated efforts to address the computer and informational literacy skills of our students,” said Peggy G. Carr, former commissioner of National Center for Education Statistics, at the time. “These skills are as fundamental as the 3 R’s [reading, writing, and arithmetic].”
Advocates for AI and screentime bans in schools have likened the competing decline of basic tech skills versus the rise in advanced technologies to “building a plane while it is flying.”
“We are no longer teaching [digital literacy] in a dedicated and explicit way,” said Jodie Carreon, national director of Schools Beyond Screens, the group that spearheaded recent screen time and AI limits at the Los Angeles Unified School District. “The way it’s operated in the past decade is to shoehorn it into disciplines where it doesn’t belong, with the idea that students would learn through osmosis.”
It’s just as important that students learn how to type with automaticity as it is that they know how to write fluently, explains researcher and assistant professor of English Education at Stanford Sarah Levine. Writing, including the process of typing, is a mode of thinking, she says. “You have to know your keyboard pretty well, and then you’re off and running.”
Carreon says there is growing concern that students are graduating high school without necessary tech skills — she’s not referring to the competitive coding or AI skills emphasized by Big Tech and corporate leaders, but basic knowledge of computers, computer science, and the way technology itself works.
“We haven’t done a great job of teaching basic digital skills or critical digital literacy. Now we’re trying to throw AI literacy on top of those gaps and it’s a recipe for disaster,” Carreon says. Schools have to go back to the basics. “We need to be much more intentional about teaching some of those prerequisites, those fundamentals, before we put increasingly powerful AI systems in students’ hands.”
