A recent Wall Street Journal report delves into Gen Z's surprising lack of keyboard typing skills, featuring interviews with several individuals and revealing some startling statistics.
I'm the oldest of Gen z (late 1990s). I have two younger siblings who are also Gen Z. Typing was a skill we learned in middleschool/ elementary. When I was about 8, we learned how to use google because it was considered a great resource to find information. By the time my middle sibling was in similar classes, they moved away from Google due to NSFW search results. When my youngest sibling was in school, they worried about shock sites.
They've slowly been removing computers from the school curriculum because of fear of outside forces. That includes typing, sadly. This is all coming from someone who grew up in a Plato self self education plan. (Online, self studies)
It was more the dicks showing up in class unprompted. Then, it was people sharing links to shock sites. Now we have to worry about people stealing information. That was always a thing, it's just a lot more common now.
Edit: I also have to admit, I remember helping the teacher enough with their computer to get Admin privileges by using their console. It was literally stuff liking helping them make a PowerPoint full-screen. I'd download games and then dispense them through little known shared files on the network (usually old forgotten projects). I'd also save shortcuts to google proxies. In hindsight, that was exactly the kind of thing they're probably trying to stop. I was pirating stuff at a young age. I definitely could've downloaded malware and shared it with the network.
What happened in 1997 to make that cut anyway? There are several definitions with their own reasoning. For example the popular one I always use just makes every recent generation last 15 years and makes cuts that are easy to remember. It defines GenX to be born until 1980, Millennials until 1995 and GenZ until 2010. If you're born in one of those split years, you're basically part of two generations, though you're free to feel more attached to one generation over the other. Not that it matters too much anyway. In the end of the day it's just a time frame to quickly phrase what age group you're roughly talking about.
That feels like too far in the other direction. Rather than open internet access, there should be a district-wide intranet or at least just a proper whitelist of allowed sites, but of course that would require a proper IT department and would be too costly for most schools.