I suppose it would be mostly practical skills, cooking, fixing things. Usually had to be done by people themselves.

Maybe also mental things like navigating (with or without paper map) and remembering their daily and weekly agendas.

What other things would be a big difference with the people today?

    • Hossenfeffer@feddit.ukEnglish
      1·
      21 minutes ago

      Almost every adult in the UK learns on manual - I’ve known about three people in my life who learned on automatic and are only licensed to drive automatics - but with the rise of electric cars (and an increase in automatics generally) I wonder if my kids will learn.

      What I never learned, but which my parents did was exactly when and to use the choke on a car. I know fuel injection made chokes unnecessary and I’ve never driven a car that had one.

      • Strider@lemmy.world
        1·
        3 hours ago

        I have to add that you’re 99.9% correct, there are rare people who only learned automatic and may only drive those. I know exactly one person, so it might well be 0.1% 😁

    • SolarBoy@slrpnk.netOPEnglish
      21·
      11 hours ago

      This one depends on where you live, I suppose. In some european countries it’s still quite common to learn to drive with a manual.

      • kernelle@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        1·
        2 hours ago

        Quite common as in, I’ve only met one person here in my life who can only drive automatic. Electric cars being more mainstream means many more people are driving automatic, but if you do your licence in an automatic you are not allowed to drive a manual car. So I’d wager over 99% of people can drive a manual. This is in Belgium btw.

      • Rothe@piefed.socialEnglish
        1·
        2 hours ago

        Yes, true here in Denmark for example, but it is slowly changing on account of the rising number of EVs.

    • sorghum@sh.itjust.works
      71·
      8 hours ago

      Lots of semi truck drivers know how to drive a manual and semi truck driver is one of the most common occupations in the US. Everyone at my company’s location knows how even though we have an all automatic fleet.

      Edit: Just to address the premise of the question only a couple of us were driving 50 years ago.

      • TheRedSpade@lemmy.world
        5·
        10 hours ago

        You likely already know this but if anybody else reading is interested, this is because if you test for your commercial license in an automatic then you’re restricted to only automatics. The schools are still teaching manual, so it doesn’t make any sense to learn that then test in an automatic and get that restriction.