Why aren’t children taught to touch-type at school?

Gordon Rayner in The Telegraph (strike-out mine):

For more than a century, the cornerstones of education have been reading, writing and arithmetic, but surely every British child would benefit if we added a fourth core skill to that list: touch-typing.

All children are given endless hours of coaching in how to use the most common computer applications, such as Windows, spreadsheets and PowerPoint, all of which are likely to have moved on significantly by the time current primary school pupils enter the world of work.

Yet they are taught how to use these programs without being taught the most basic computing skill of all – typing. It is the modern-day equivalent of teaching a child to do joined-up writing without ever showing them how to hold a pencil. …

Looking (way, way) back on my high-school career, I see now that the single most useful class I took, measured in day-to-day utility these decades later, was a half-semester of typing. I took the course because I ran out of other classes in my rural high school (there were 16 in my class that junior year) in an era in which there were typewriters, not computers, on the world’s desktops.