At a recent PTA meeting, I heard a parent complain about the availability of low-cost pocket calculators. Since it's a bit unusual to hear complaints about low cost and easy availability of a commodity, I listened carefully.

The problem, it seems, is that children are said to be using these calculators instead of learning how to do arithmetic.

This sounds like a reasonable complaint. However, as the author of an article entitled "Toward a Post-Literate Society: Why Should Johnny Read?" I feel a need to present the opposing point of view.

The problem of technology stunting the development of certain skills — if, indeed, it is a problem — is not new. In fact, it goes back to the very beginning of technology. One can imagine cave parents complaining that with all these newfangled wheels coming into widespread use, children were failing to develop the basic skills necessary to drag their belongings along the ground. Or an ancient galley slave bemoaning the fact that his offspring showed no interest in learning necessary skills; they'd rather take up this sailing fad.

The obsolescence of various skills continues. Personally, I couldn't start a fire with two sticks to save my life, unless one of them was a match.

My article on the post-literate society did not, of course, suggest that reading is as obsolete a skill as fire-making is to a city dweller like myself. It's true that the rise of the electronic media has made it possible for the average person to be not merely entertained, but better informed than at any previous period in history, without reading a word.

However, it's also true that reading will never lose its potential to enrich the life of anyone who avails himself of it — a point of view which I have not failed to pass on to my children.

But arithmetic? I don't know. It may be that future generations, who wear calculators on their wrists, will regard the ability to do arithmetic much the same as we, who wear timepieces on our wrists, regard the ability to tell time by the sun — as something interesting and quaint, not without uses that can be imagined, but scarcely worth bothering to learn.

By the way, that article, "Why Should Johnny Read?" — I submitted it a couple of years ago to a journal whose audience consists almost exclusively of reading teachers.

It was very decisively rejected.