This may be old-fashioned, but a bard in hand is worth two sitcom writers

In these inventive times, when new technologies become obsolete almost as soon as we get used to them, young people can be frustrated when confronted with some out-of-date gadget.

Of course they all know how to drive a stick-shift car, because the stick shift remains in vogue, especially with the young, despite the general acceptance of automatic drive.

Many other perfectly workable devices of the past, however, have been discarded, mostly because they are not quite as convenient as the new. Pencils, for example.

We are sometimes shocked by the suddenness with which some reliable old standby vanishes into quaintness and history.

Only a few crank engineers still use the slide rule, I am told, although only a few years ago it was the main tool for abstruse calculations. It has been replaced, of course, by the computer. I wonder how many young engineers today could go back to their slide rules if their computers broke down.

Naomi Michaels of Van Nuys writes that she was jolted recently when a fifth-grader came to the office in the school where she works and asked to use a telephone. She directed him to a nearby dial phone.

He went to the phone and stood there. She asked him why he wasn’t calling. He said he didn’t know how.

Thinking he had forgotten his number, she reproached him, pointing out that every child should know his home phone number.

The boy said, “I know my number but I don’t know how to use the telephone.”

She could hardly believe that a fifth-grade pupil wouldn’t know how to use a telephone. Baffled, she asked him what he meant.

“Where are the buttons?” the boy asked.

Instantly she realized that the boy did not know how to use a dial telephone. She felt guilty for having reproached him.

“Guilt was quickly replaced by depression. Depression because I suddenly realized that here is a human being who has never lived without a push-button telephone. . . . I have not yet reached 40, but progress has already dated me.”

Dona Glover of Van Nuys tells an even more depressing story, since it illustrates the inability of some young people to fall back on mental skills when their machines break down.

She was in an ice cream parlor recently when the computerized cash register went out. The young manager tried to ring up a sale but it wouldn’t work. Customers began crowding in from a nearby movie theater. Teen-agers began to tease the clerks. Finally the manager sent one to the front door with the keys. “Close it,” he told him.

“Without the reassuring hum of a computerized cash register the young men couldn’t conduct the business of selling ice cream cones,” Glover says. “Simply writing the amount of each sale down was beyond them. They were in over their heads when it came to running an ice cream store for an hour and a half sans computer.”

I doubt that McDonald’s could have sold a billion hamburgers without computers to take the orders and tote up the bills.

Not only are many of our young becoming technologidiots, they seem to have lost any interest in the past whatever. It is as if the world did not exist beyond their fifth birthday, when their memories of self-gratification begin.

A classic illustration of this attitude was given us the other day in a story by Jack Mathews about discrimination against older writers in television and movies.

Herb Meadow, a successful television writer since the 1940s, angered a young producer with a reference to Shakespeare:

“I used Shakespeare to illustrate a point and he got very upset. He said he hadn’t read Shakespeare or any of the classics and he didn’t intend to. He said, ‘No history, no literature, nothing that happened before I was born is relevant to my life today.’ ”

He wouldn’t know of Romeo and Juliet, Freud, Lindbergh, Sam Spade, Cleopatra, Huckleberry Finn, Copernicus, Sherlock Holmes, Madame Bovary, Captain Nemo, Confucius, Hamlet or Candide. He wouldn’t care.

Maybe that explains why we have been patronized, insulted and bored silly the past several years by a gutter stream of movies about drugs, violence and kid sex.

There are signs that the high school confidential genre of movies is going out. I hope it goes out before Hollywood finds out how to make “feelies,” the kind of movies envisioned by Aldous Huxley in his “Brave New World.”

If we’re going to feel movie love scenes as well as see and hear them, I want the performers to be somebody mature, like Harrison Ford and Kathleen Turner, instead of a couple of panting teen-agers.

I hope none of this gives anyone the impression that I don’t like the young. Most of those I know are charming, beautiful, and, of course, healthy. They not only are the future, they are the present. They are of the computer age. They take high tech for granted.

But it couldn’t hurt if they knew a little history and read a little Shakespeare. And it might come in handy sometime if they learned how to use a dial telephone.

I am my own best example of this fatal reliance on the new. I nearly went out of my mind a week or two ago when my computer broke down. It took five days to get it going again. I was helpless. I had to take a week’s vacation.

“We still have a typewriter,” my wife reminded me.

The truth is, my fingers have forgotten how to use one.