A recent article in the Washington Post finally trickled to the top of my reading list this morning. In a May 25th article entitled “Computers’ Mistakeover,” Leslie Walker reviews several recent examples of computer “glitches” (aka “bugs”) — including a recent bug that caused Citibank to make 274,800 incorrect banking transactions in Japan, another one that led an Indiana gas station to sell gas for two-hundredths of a penny per gallon, and yet another one that shut down security checkpoints at the Atlanta airport for hours, costing Delta Airlines $1.3 million.

That was followed by several other examples and anecdotes about computer glitches, though none of them were particularly scary; Ms. Walker apparently hasn’t heard about some of the bugs in safety-critical systems that date back as far as the early 1960s. If you’d like to see an ongoing discussion of bugs being reported and discussed within the computer profession itself, check out the “Inside Risks” column of the Communications of the ACM; you can find a compendium of recent columns here. You might also want to track down a copy of Computer-Related Risks, the definitive book on the subject, by computer-risk guru Peter Neumann; it might seem a little dated, with a 1994 publication date, but it really does provide an excellent perspective on the subject.

But what I found most interesting about Ms. Walker’s story was her story of a manual “workaround” that a group of airline ticket agents had been forced to use when their computer system wouldn’t issue boarding passes for passengers — and her comment that when she recounted the story to a friend, the friend “talked about how adamant he is that his young kids not only develop proficiency with pen and paper, but also learn how to use dead-tree dictionaries, so they won’t be too dependent on computers and Google.”

Wow! Teaching kids to survive in a world without Google? Is it possible? Does it really make sense? Is there any chance that educators and parents would go along with such an idea? I don’t know — and I have no idea whether anyone is even discussing the idea.

But it does remind me of a fascinating lecture at a PTA meeting that I attended while my own kids were in elementary school, some 20 years ago — in which a distinguished Harvard professor (whose name, sadly, I’ve completely forgotten) argued passionately that we should be teaching our kids to learn basic arithmetic without calculators. The education system was just beginning to confront the reality that calculators were now cheap enough for anyone to afford, and that they might even appear as free toys in a box of cereal. So why not just teach kids to operate a calculator, and spare them the tedious burden of memorizing multiplication tables and long division?

The Harvard professor’s argument was that only by learning arithmetic the old-fashioned way would the average citizen have a “gut-level” understanding of whether a calculator’s answer to a multiplication/division computation was off by a factor of ten, or a factor of 100. And I have indeed seen this phenomenon, on repeated occasions in the ensuing twenty years: reasonably intelligent men and women will quickly type a mathematical computation into their hand-held calculator (or key it into the cell of an Excel spreadsheet), and produce answers that are not only wrong by several orders of magnitude, but that absolutely defy common sense. But if a calculator says you can drive from New York to Washington in three nanoseconds, it must be right; and if the calculator tells you, after attempting to balance your checkbook, that you’ve got more money in your account than the combined fortunes of BIll Gates and Warren Buffet, then it must be so!

So, yes, I do agree that kids should still learn basic arithmetic the old-fashioned way — even if they dispense with it ten years later, and enjoy the convenience of a calculator. But whether the same argument applies to searching without Google … well, I’m still thinking about that. I guess I could figure out how to use the card-filing system in the local library, in order to find some material for a research project. But I’m not even sure where the local library is, and I doubt that it’s open when I really need to use it. As for using old-fashioned dictionaries and encyclopedias … sorry, they’re all gone.

But hopefully the elementary schools still have their copies; and yes, perhaps we should be emphasizing those skills to our children, so they’ll remember not to trust Google too much. It’s interesting food for thought.