Templeton Times: Closing school libraries? This means war by Stephen Segal

Closing school libraries? This means war

Philadelphia's school budget woes have shuttered the district's much-lauded libraries. It's a failure of basic civilization that cannot be allowed to stand.

By Stephen Segal

Add Comment | Comments: 7 | Posted Sep. 13, 2013

And so finally it's come to this: The Philadelphia School District has closed its top schools' libraries due to the budget crisis. Only 15 librarians remain in the entire district, where enrollment has already climbed past last year's 150,000 students. As the Inquirer reported today, principals at Central High and Masterman are scrambling to figure out how exactly they're supposed to give students an education without being able to give them books to read.
Let me spell this out in no uncertain terms: The library is the single most important operation in any school.
It's more important than each and every classroom.
The library is where students engage their own minds.
The library is the place that embodies the concept of intellectual activity being something for a person to choose.
Whether you are a social progressive who believes public education should be the nation's top funding priority, a fiscal conservative who believes a free market of school-choice options is the only way to keep educators accountable for their job performance, or a moderate who just hopes kids will emerge into adult society as vaguely functional human beings, there is nothing to debate here. Libraries are civilization.

Whether you believe public-school teachers are tragically underpaid and under-appreciated martyrs to humanity's future or lazy union employees who enjoy coasting on tenure and seniority through a lifetime of ten-month work years, there is nothing to debate here. Libraries are education.
Whether you point a finger of blame for our sorry school system at negligent parents, corrupt politicians, inner-city violence or an uncaring corporate nation that prefers to raise mindless consumers rather than engaged citizens, there is nothing to debate here. Libraries are sanctuary.
A school where students are not free to use a library is not a school. It's a multiple-choice indoctrination camp.
On occasion, I've heard people suggest that the ubiquity of the internet makes libraries obsolete. They are wrong. They are very, very wrong. And here's why: because what a library is goes much deeper than its collection.
Yes, the internet is the greatest library collection of documents ever imagined by man—and yet it is a collection, not a library, because people are not disembodied information searches, we are people. We exist in our bodies, adjacent to other people who exist in their bodies, and the library is where we go and join those other people in the shared communion that seeking knowledge and understanding of our world is good. That communion—the unspoken pact everyone in every library has tacitly signed that we are part of an ongoing, eons-old quest to improve our lives via learning—is what makes it possible for a people to keep creating tomorrow.
The books, whether they're printed books on shelves or digital books on screens, are important. But what actually makes the library the core of civilization, of education, isn't the books themselves—it's the communal agreement that sharing the books makes us all, individually and collectively, better.
Any closed library is an insult to civilization. Closing the libraries inside schools isn't just an insult: It's a declaration of war. As of this week's hobbled attempt at a new school year, Philadelphia has declared a suicidal war on our own future. The question is no longer who's responsible. The question is: What are we all going to do about it?

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COMMENTS

Comments 1 - 7 of 7

1. Anonymous said... on Sep 14, 2013 at 08:24AM

“Our library is closed and the area is being used as a classroom so we can't even have access to the books or the 20 or so computers we used to be able to assign students to use. Waste!”

2. Bryan Karl Lathrop said... on Sep 14, 2013 at 09:13AM

“Bravo, Stephen! Eloquent, pithy, punchy and really balanced sentiment about the insanity that confronts not just our students, but our city and region. "Suicidal war" pretty much sums things up. Thank you so much for writing this gem, I'll be spreading the word a out our plight via your article. again, bravo! Hellz yeah, even.”

3. Anonymous said... on Sep 14, 2013 at 02:27PM

“We are a elementary school. Last year our library was opened with two Paraprofessionals manning the helm. This year it is closed. Right now it has become a storage are of books that teachers do not need.

”

4. Anonymous said... on Sep 14, 2013 at 06:03PM

“I taught in Phila. public schools from 1985 until 2007 and was in an elementary school until 2004. During those 20 years, in 3 different schools, there was a paraprofessional in one elementary school where I taught for 8 years, a librarian in a middle school the one year I taught there, and NO librarian or paraprofessional in the beautiful library space in the elementary school where I taught for 12 years. I fully agree that a school without a library is tantamount to a declaration of war, but why wasn't that declaration made back in 1993 when I first went back to elementary? Our school never did get a librarian. To my mind and though I never did agree, that sent a message to administration that libraries were not necessary in elementary schools. This decline has been a long time coming, but has finally become a steep, slippery slope.”

5. Anonymous said... on Sep 14, 2013 at 07:19PM

“We hold these students accountable for high acheivement but don't provide the equity amongst districts and schools to support them, you don't have to be a math genius to figure out that high standards with NO resources will NOT add up to a quality education. Common Core standards require students use critical thinking and evidence to support their findings - just where will these students access the needed resources and who will instruct them in how to use them ethically?Libraries are just about reading they are also about contributing as a participant as a creator of information. Students aren't prepared for post graduation opportunities IF we don't provide age appropriate instruction to prepare them. We want our graduates to be critical thinkers and problem-solvers not unengaged bubble fillers.”

6. TooManyFreeloaders said... on Sep 15, 2013 at 01:53PM

“Let's get real. Education costs money. That money comes from taxes. Philly has a serious rat population. Those who have no jobs and cannot afford kids continue to out breed those who do! All I see are more mommas popping out kids, all while living off welfare. If a college educated woman who is married and makes very good money each year can afford ONE kid.......do not try to convince me that the woman with a HS diploma, no husband and five or six kids with NO job can. They TAKE tax dollars, yet do not MAKE tax dollars. And you think the money to educate all your kids comes from WHERE????”

7. Dr Phil said... on Sep 15, 2013 at 03:21PM

“Schools need libraries. Any government's first duty is towards the development of its population. If in a civilized nation, like the United States, education is not readily and freely available to all its children, what would that nation look like ten years down the road? It will slide down the hill. Tax money should go into providing all our children with schools equipped with good teachers, libraries and librarians. To fail to do this takes away the claim to greatness by any nation. Any government that shows the lack of understanding of its purpose and duty of investing in the future of its community should resign. It has lost its way, and has failed the very people who elected it in the first place.”

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