Literacy

Why I Will Vote For Our Library Levy

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Next Tuesday Worthington Public Library, the library that serves our area, has a levy on the ballot. The levy will add approximately $60 a year or $5 a month to my property taxes. While that doesn’t sound like much, every little bit of taxes eats into my discretionary income. And the truth is, my home is a library of sorts, and so much is available on the internet. I have no school age children at home. So why vote for this?

For one thing, it isn’t all about me. Libraries are one of the things that make communities rich and livable. They serve as a community center. Our nearby library serves as a community meeting space. When a number of us were concerned to save a local wetland from developers, the library was a key meeting center.

I am also deeply impressed with the number of children’s programs and after school programs and academic assistance offered the children and youth of our community by the library. The love of literature and literacy is under fire with so many competing distractions. Libraries are one of the places helping children fall in love with stories and books and the wonderful experience of the imagined story unmediated by video. Our library also offers tutor rooms and serves as a wonderful adjunct to a good school system.

Our library also offers resources to immigrants and those who are economically challenged through unemployment to access the internet, search for jobs, print documents when they may not be able to afford the computers, internet connections and printers at home needed for functions many of us easily accomplish. Many who use these services are working hard to establish themselves and are not looking for a hand out but a hand up that helps them with their own initiative and respects their dignity.

Our library stewards it resources well and has been nationally recognized. It was rated a Five Star Library in November 2012, one of only 30 to receive this award for the past five years. It seeks to be responsive to the community, enjoys continuing increases in patronage, and has vastly increased its resources in the area of digital downloads, recognizing the changing world of libraries.

Lastly, I find they continue to provide excellent service. I don’t borrow books often but when I do, I can obtain books from any Columbus Metro Library within days. They even have drive through pickup on reserves. Recently, I was researching books on changing trends in higher education and was able to obtain a number of books on reserve from my home computer, was able to download one available in digital to my Kindle, and reserve via internet chat a book not in the system via inter-library loan, all in about 15 minutes, without even having to go to the library. What a pleasure!

Actually, come to think of it, the books I reserved would probably have cost me what I will spend in property taxes to support the library.  All in all, not a bad bargain for such an important community resource!

Neil Gaiman on Libraries and Literacy

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Today is a travel day.  Thought I would post this article by Neil Gaiman titled “Why Our Future Depends on Libraries, Reading and Daydreaming“.  The question I continue to wonder about is with the digitization of media, will the physical spaces we call “libraries” continue to be necessary?  I can see the “library of the future” consisting of a computer server (and this need not be localized) and an office with cubicles where librarians spend their day fielding online queries.  I personally would miss the sensual wonder of wandering the stacks and the serendipitous discoveries, but that may not mean much to others.

Literacy and Liberty

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This week I’ve been in several conversations with people and with books I’m reading around the theme of the connection between cultural literacy and preserving our liberties. This item first came up as I was reading Os Guinness’s Suicide of a Free People. Guinness’s basic idea is that there are two kinds of freedom–freedom from and freedom for–and that our society almost exclusively emphasizes the former in a manner that is unsustainable for the long haul.  He argues that our founders were wiser in part on these matters because their thought was formed by the classic Greek and Latin writers on government and human affairs, as well as more recent writers like Locke.  For example, they knew of Polybius and the three ideal forms of government, including democracy, and each forms degraded expression, which for democracy is mob rule and built into the constitution various constraints against mob rule in the balancing of powers.

In John Henry Newman’s Idea of a University, Newman doesn’t address this directly but speaks of the enlargement of mind that he believes is a function of a liberal education as it classically has been understood:

That only is true enlargement of mind which is the power of viewing many things at once as one whole, of referring them severally to their true place in the universal system, of understanding their respective values, and determining their mutual dependence.

What both writers have in common is the recognition of a breadth of perspective that comes when we engage the great writers and great books.  And this is what came up in a couple conversations with university faculty this week. The great concern is that in place of this kind of education, today’s student usually gets a smattering of self-selected GEC courses and lots of focused training in a very specific, job-related area, unless they opt to go to a liberal arts college, or a place like St John’s, that focuses on a Great Books curriculum.  (Here is the reading list for their curriculum.)

What troubles me is that while there is great emphasis on preparing students for entering the world of work, it seems there is little that facilitates the enlargement of mind of which Newman speaks.  Many of us bemoan the smallness of mind that characterizes our present political discourse.  The question for me is whether in fact we are achieving the result that we are aiming for, highly skilled specialists who fuel our economic engines but lack the enlargement of mind and the habits of literacy to think cogently over a lifetime about the important matters required of us as citizens in a representative democracy? Perhaps what troubles me most is wondering what will happen should the cohort entering our workforce wake up and recognize that their education has been directed primarily to the end of making them cogs in our economic machine, and the only resource at hand to them is inchoate anger?  That, it seems, is a prescription for mob rule.