Last spring, my mom mailed my nephew a card for his 20th birthday. Inside was a check for $50 and a short note in her looping cursive, the same handwriting that signed every permission slip of my childhood.
He texted me a photo of it with one line: “What does this say?”
He couldn’t read the note. He also wasn’t totally sure what to do with the check, because he’d never deposited one.
When I told my mom, she was quiet for a second. Then she said, “Well, what are they teaching them?”
It’s a fair question, and it’s the flip side of the quiet skills Boomers and Gen X carry that younger people tend to shrug off. Boomers assume certain things are universal because, for them, somebody always taught them. A teacher, a parent, or plain necessity.
For a lot of people born after the mid-90s, that somebody never showed up. Not out of neglect. The class got cut, the bill went online, the car in the driveway changed. The lessons stopped, and nobody sent a memo.
1. Cursive was dropped from most classrooms before Gen Z got there
A Boomer jots a note on the back of an envelope, leaves it on the counter, and assumes it’ll get read. For a lot of people under 25, it’s a puzzle.
Cursive was left out of the Common Core standards that most states adopted around 2010. The standards didn’t ban it, but plenty of districts took the omission as permission to stop teaching it. Kids who started school after that often got a few weeks of it, or none at all.
Historian Drew Gilpin Faust, a former president of Harvard, found out how far it had gone while teaching a seminar on the Civil War. Two-thirds of her students couldn’t read cursive, she told NPR, which put much of the era’s handwritten record out of their reach. “I was just stunned,” she said.
More than 20 states have since passed laws bringing cursive back. That helps the kids in second grade right now. It doesn’t help the 24-year-old holding a birthday card from Grandma.
2. Paying a bill by mail is something most of them have rarely had to do
Write the check. Record it in the register. Address the envelope, return address in the top left, stamp in the top right. Drop it in the box by the 25th so it arrives before the 1st.
Boomers did this every month for decades. It was so routine that nobody thought of it as a skill.
Younger people mostly never had a reason to learn. Bills went online, then to autopay, then to apps. By the time they had rent to pay, the landlord had a portal.
The shift happened fast.
The share of household bill payments made by mail fell from 50 percent in 2009 to 23 percent in 2019, according to Postal Service data cited by the agency’s Inspector General.
To be fair, the stereotype runs a little ahead of the facts. In that same report, 80 percent of Gen Z teens surveyed said they were at least fairly confident they could address an envelope. They know how in theory. What they’re missing is the repetition that turns it into something you do without looking it up.
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3. Touch typing stopped being a standard class
Older people look at a 22-year-old who grew up with a screen in hand and assume they can type 80 words a minute without looking. Often they can’t. They hunt and peck, eyes on the keys, checking the screen every few sentences.
Typing class used to be a normal stop in high school. Then it quietly faded, partly on the assumption that kids raised on devices would pick it up on their own.
They picked up thumbs instead.
The share of high school graduates who’d taken a keyboarding course dropped from 44 percent in 2000 to 2.5 percent in 2019, Inc. reported, drawing on a Wall Street Journal story. The Journal’s piece leaned mostly on anecdotes, but the course numbers are hard to argue with.
Billie Eilish has said as much herself. “I never learned to type because I wasn’t that generation, and now I regret it,” she told Rolling Stone.
4. Knowing where a file is saved on a computer isn’t a given anymore
Ask a Boomer where they saved a document and they’ll walk you through it: Documents, then Taxes, then 2019. They built that structure the way they’d build a filing cabinet, because the filing cabinet came first.
A lot of younger people don’t think about it that way at all. They save something wherever the app puts it and find it again by typing a few words into a search bar.
In 2021, professors told The Verge that when they asked students where a file was saved, many didn’t understand the question. Some science instructors started teaching directory structure as a basic skill, right alongside the actual coursework.
Not everyone sees it as a problem. One 24-year-old argued on Medium that searching is simply the more intuitive way to use a computer, and that search has gotten good enough to make folders fade into the background.
He has a point. Right up until a program asks for a file path and nobody in the room knows what that means.
5. Home ec used to teach cooking and sewing basics, and most schools cut it
Sewing a button back on. Hemming a pair of pants by hand. Scrambling eggs without a recipe video. Knowing a teaspoon from a tablespoon.
Boomers learned a lot of this in home economics, which was once a routine part of middle and high school. Their kids got less of it. Their grandkids, mostly, got none.
Enrollment in family and consumer sciences, the renamed version of home ec, fell 38 percent in the decade leading up to 2012, NPR reported, to about 3.5 million students. Teacher shortages, testing pressure and budget cuts all played a part.
The teachers who remain see the gap up close. “Sometimes we take for granted that kids know how to wash dishes,” Susan Turgeson, who led an association of teacher educators in the field, told NPR.
So the shirt with the missing button goes in a pile, or gets replaced. Not because anyone is lazy. Because nobody ever handed them a needle and thread and sat with them while they tried.
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6. Most younger drivers never learned to drive a stick shift
For a lot of Boomers, a manual transmission was just a car. Plenty of family cars had one, and learning the clutch in an empty parking lot on a Sunday was a normal part of getting a license.
That’s mostly gone. Manuals now make up a sliver of new car sales, so the parent in the passenger seat has nothing to teach with.
In a June 2026 survey of about 1,000 Americans by the auto parts retailer AmericanMuscle, 83 percent of Boomers said they could drive stick, compared with 39 percent of Gen Z. Most people who learned were taught by a parent or another family member.
That’s the whole pattern in one number. The skill didn’t fade because it got harder. It faded because the car in the driveway changed.
7. Changing a flat tire is something many younger drivers have never done
Boomers learned to change a tire because they had to. Roadside help often meant walking to find a pay phone, and nearly every car had a spare and a jack in the trunk.
A lot of younger drivers have never touched a lug wrench. When a tire goes flat, they open an app and wait.
Part of that is the cars themselves.
AAA found that 28 percent of 2017 model year vehicles didn’t come with a spare tire as standard equipment, up from about 5 percent in 2006. It’s hard to practice a skill your car doesn’t give you the parts for.
Still, knowing how can be the difference between a 20-minute delay and an afternoon on the shoulder. The grandparent who assumes their grandkid can handle it is often in for a surprise.
8. Reading a paper map was never part of their road trips
A Boomer road trip came with a folded map in the glove box and someone in the passenger seat whose job was to read it. You learned the legend, the grid along the edges, the difference between an interstate and a county road, and how to turn the map so it matched the direction you were driving.
Younger people learned to follow a blue dot. It works beautifully, right up until the signal drops in a national park or the phone dies because they left the house at 4 percent.
The navigator’s job simply moved to the phone, and it never moved back. When a parent hands over a paper map in a dead zone, they’re assuming a skill that was never passed down, because for years it never needed to be.
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9. Tying a tie is something many young men learn from a video
A lot of Boomer men learned to tie a tie from their fathers, standing in front of a bathroom mirror. Then they wore one to school, to church, and to work often enough that their hands took over.
Offices went casual and dress codes loosened. Plenty of younger men now tie a tie a few times a year, usually for a wedding or a funeral, with a tutorial propped up on the sink.
The older guy at the wedding who reaches over and fixes the knot without a word isn’t showing off. He’s doing something he’s done a thousand times, and assuming everyone else has too.
These skills faded because daily life stopped requiring them
None of these gaps are character flaws. Every skill on this list was taught by someone: a teacher with a curriculum, a parent with a free Saturday, or a situation that didn’t leave any other option.
When the class got cut or the car changed or the bill moved online, the teaching stopped. Nobody announced it. Boomers kept assuming these things were universal because, for most of their lives, they were.
My nephew did deposit that check, eventually. My mom walked him through it over FaceTime. She’d learned how to use FaceTime from him, two Christmases ago.
