Think back to your school days: Are you nostalgic for flipping through a dusty library card catalog or clacking away on a typewriter? Some subjects you remember from those days are probably things of the past, although the finer points of how schools have changed might surprise you. These six subjects are either fading from U.S. high school curriculums or fundamentally changing.
Shorthand
Shorthand alphabets help people write things down more quickly by hand, making them valuable for recording court testimony, legislative proceedings, or interviews — not to mention reading those notes after they were taken. By the early 20th century, shorthand was taught in public schools. Yet in the ensuing decades, more efficient ways to take notes dominated, like audio recording and typing. Shorthand was mostly phased out of schools by the 1990s.
Latin
Today, around 8% of U.S. high schools have some sort of Latin language class, but it used to be standard practice, especially when many colleges required it for admission. High school Latin education took a hit during World War II, when liberal arts education became less popular. It continued to decline slowly in the 1960s and 1970s in favor of more immediately practical languages, such as French and Spanish.