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From this, it sounds like I was lucky that I took a typing class in in high school (mostly because I wanted some easy credits). Do most schools not offer this?
The typing class I took was by far the best, most useful class I had in four years of high school -- and the only one where I could not have learned the material better by simply being left alone in a quiet room with the textbook. (Although being left alone with a computer and a decent learn-to-type program would probably have done just as well; but this was 1994 and my school had typewriters, not computers, so the teacher was actually useful.)
Seconded, typing class was by far the best, most useful class in all of my years of schooling. I took it in 6th grade.
My 6th grade class was taught touch typing, reinforced with some typing games that became surprisingly popular. High school also had a typing class for the business path, which was dropped when the administration realised that most of the students didn't need the course or were failing. Nothing about proper posture in either though, which needless to say is quite essential to proper touch typing.
I think it's pretty common. I had two years of it in middle school. It never really stuck though; all my attempts to learn proper home-row style touch typing were a complete wash. After about six or seven years of computer use, I realized that I had absorbed the locations of the keys in my muscle memory, and was able to touch type in spite of not using proper form; as Kaj Sotala says, the bottleneck is thinking about what to type, not typing it.
I'm not sure how many people are equally ill served by the various teaching programs that are available, but I'd be surprised if I'm the only one.
Mine has an assessment in it in early high school, but it's not a main part of the course and you only learn it if you take applications. (As opposed to Multimedia, Programming or Hardware.)
Anyway, I got from about 15WPM to 25WPM at school. Then I got my own computer at home, and in two weeks I was up to 60WPM just from using it so much.
I'm now at around 75-80WPM
Mine required it, although it wasn't just typing.
Mine never did (1980-84). I learnt at 23 after I'd been editing a fanzine for a few years, something which required me to type a lot. And learning to type with ten fingers instead of two took me from 15-20wpm to 40wpm within a few weeks. SO WORTH IT.