At 51, I’m one of the few people my age who can boast of using an old-fashioned dip pen and inkwell in elementary school. Who remembers sitting at the back of a frigid classroom in winter, while the teacher snuggled up at the front of the room beside a cast-iron, pot-bellied stove.

Who had to put on a coat and shiver while doing his private business in the unheated, roofless school bathroom on the other side of the lawn.

Ah, nostalgia. Old memories are always so rosy . . . and boring to everyone else.

But my tiptoeing down Memory Lane and a Normal Rockwell youth might help you understand why I occasionally find disconcerting the growing technology in our schools.

Oh, I’m resigned to the fact that the Ticonderoga pencil is losing out to the computer keyboard. I’m not surprised that, instead of wielding a stub of chalk, today’s students fiddle about with large-screen, electronic “smart boards.”

Mind you, I still have a problem with the widespread use of the calculator. When it comes to basic everyday math, I’ve noticed at the grocery store I can calculate my change faster than the young clerk can read the screen of today’s electronic cash registers.

But what really leaves me queasy is the idea that the school library is on the brink of historic change—some even talk of its demise.

I hope that won’t happen. As a pasty-faced, bookish kid, I used to poke amongst the shelves of my school library in search of novels and history books that would take me places I’d never even imagined.

(Of course, my fondness of the library might have something to do with the fact that the school bullies never set foot in there.)

Now, people have bemoaned the death of reading and books for a generation. But I’m not so worried about that. While modern technology has found better ways of distributing lots of basic information and data, paper and ink are not going anywhere.

(I doubt you plan to do next summer’s beach reading with a laptop balanced on your knees.)

But I was a bit disturbed by a USA Today article about a cushy boarding school in Massachusetts that’s getting rid of its “barely used” 20,000 library books in favor of a digital collection.

According to USA Today, “bloggers and commentators worldwide have called [the] headmaster a snob, a spendthrift and a book burner and even compared him to Adolf Hitler.”

Harsh stuff. And wrongheaded. Even I have to admit there’s some logic to this plan. Electronic books can be much cheaper than a printed one. And if a school library only has three copies of Shakespeare’s works, how is a class of 30 supposed to read about the mischief of Richard III? Electronic resources can be shared much more easily.

But what will electronic books do to the concept of a school library? While there soon might be no need for a central, physical repository of knowledge in this age of electronics, how will students get the guidance they need to explore the information available to them?

Who will police and develop a rich collection for them to explore? How will students learn the difference between fact and propaganda? Will scrolling on a computer screen whet a student’s appetite for knowledge as well as a row of bookshelves?

And will schools that “go digital” make the right investment in technology? At Galley Cat, a New York-based news blog about the publishing industry, Senior Editor Ron Hogan shared a thoughtful observation with USA Today. He pointed out that “I’ve got a drawer full of 7-inch floppy disks here.”

Hmm. He’s got a point. You can’t go wrong with a book. After hundreds of years, paper and ink still hasn’t become obsolete . . . at least not yet.

Del Stover, Senior Editor