Is it time to go “old school?”

New Hampshire Governor Kelly Ayotte is leaning that way. She announced plans for a cellphone ban in schools across the Granite State during her recent inaugural address. Ayotte elaborated on this mission on her social media X account:

“Screens are negatively impacting our learning environments, drawing students’ attention away from their classes, and becoming a barrier for teachers to do their jobs — no more.”

Is she right?

If I say yes, I sound old and grumpy, but smartphones and social media are “dumbing down our youth,” according to some behavioral experts. Test scores have been falling since 2012, and these screens are not always good for teenagers’ mental health.

Before the digital age and the advent of the World Wide Web, we kids were on our own. My late father, an old-school newspaper editor, would try to teach us proper grammar and spelling. “Cemetery” and “accommodate” were two words he told us even well-educated people often spelled incorrectly. “Look it up, if you’re unsure,” he would say.

“Yeah, OK, Dad.” Back then, you had to search through dictionaries, encyclopedias and other books to find basic information. You could visit the Nashua Public Library or call the library’s reference desk for help with book reports, etc.

Today, tons of information is instantly available with the click of a tablet or swipe of a smartphone when these amazing devices are used for academic enrichment.

Adults also make mistakes while scrolling rapidly through onscreen research rather than reading in print (there is a difference). This, in turn, can lead to “shallow information processing.”

My error came in a recent column about Greeley Park’s Stone House. I was looking up “John Cotton” online who donated money to Nashua in 1908. I added that I believed he was also a veteran of the Revolutionary War. Ugh. Idiot. I am. In my defense, there were several John Cottons I was researching. I meant to write he was probably a relative of the late soldier.

A sharp Lowell Sun reader caught the error and tracked me down.

The late John D. Harrigan kindly wrote me several encouraging emails over the years when he learned I had been given the privilege of being a newspaper columnist. He also corrected grammatical mistakes in my notes to him. Mr. Harrigan was taught old school by my editor-father when he worked at the Nashua Telegraph in the early 1970s.

“I still use, every day, axioms of good writing that ‘Stylie’ drilled into us like the drill instructor he was,” Mr. Harrigan told me. “Accidents don’t take place, they happen or occur. A car can’t collide with a tree; for that, the tree would have to be moving. You can jump in the river once you’re in it, but for that, you have to jump in. A robbery, because it had to be planned, takes place.”

Mr. Harrigan went on to the New Hampshire Sunday News and other periodicals before editing and publishing three newspapers of his own. He wrote a syndicated column for newspapers in the northern two-thirds of the state, wrote for InDepthNH.org and did a weekly radio gig on Concord’s WTPL. Mr. Harrigan, a fantastic writer, was also named to the New England Newspaper Hall of Fame.

Are we all doomed in the Information Age?

The late physicist Albert Einstein said, “I fear the day that technology will surpass our human interaction. The world will have a generation of idiots.”

Er, is anyone ready for some digital detox?