I believe at the school where I teach, maybe 2 or 3 people know how to drive a manual. My dad’s reasoning for making me learn to drive a manual was, “What if you are in a situation where you need to get away or there’s an emergency & that’s the only vehicle around?”
It was an airtight argument. No one sadly learns to drive one anymore.
I was in the service in the 80’s when we transformed all of our vehicles from manual transmissions to automatics. One of the reasons is that we have actually, in the past, lost personnel because we had people in combat situations die because they jumped into a vehicle which was manual and they did not know how to drive it therefore they were not able to get out of harms way.