The new Dark Ages are dawning

[altivo]

There was a time when books were the exclusive province of the wealthy and the cleric. Neither literacy nor access to the printed word were available to any other socioeconomic class.

Now school administrators in America are deliberately working to recreate that situation.

Exclusive Boston school dumps library completely

No, you idiots, it isn't "all on the internet" yet. Maybe in another century or so it will be, but I doubt it. Buying a few Kindles and circulating them among your students is not a replacement for a library. The number of important works still relevant to education that are not yet available on the Kindle or the internet is still larger than the number that can be found there. A $50,000 coffee shop with an $11,000 espresso maker is never going to serve as a replacement for a real library with a real librarian or two.

It's very obvious that these so-called educators have narrowed down the definition of education to include only "job readiness" and "hireability" and have completely forgotten the importance of breadth, exposure, and serendipity in exposure to literature, history, and, most importantly, VALUES. That last is exactly what these guys lack. I would not send my children to such a school.

Comments

[avon-deer.livejournal.com]

I must admit, I do not read books as much as I used to. I need to get back into it. I'd never consider actually closing a school library though. Even in this day and age.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I'm willing to bet that the administrators who made this decision do not read books either. Their notion of "education" is limited to "being able to get a job" rather than being able to adapt, improvise, and adjust to changes.

A highly specialized school, such as a law school, can get by today without a large print library. A generalized school, such as a college, university, or secondary school, though... This is utter stupidity, it really is. What these idiotic administrators are saying is that any book older than 20 years, or written in a language other than English, is "irrelevant" and not needed. Any new book from a small publisher is "irrelevant" and not needed. Any book not carried by Amazon is "irrelevant" and not needed. It's a funny sort of censorship, imposed entirely on an economic basis. And that's why I equate it with the medieval approach to literature and literacy.

[megadog.livejournal.com]

No doubt in the middle-ages the Monastic keepers-of-the-libraries-of-illuminated-manuscripts viewed Gutenberg and his printing-press with equal horror.

I guess it's all a matter of timing. Whether it is *yet* time to dispense with hardcopy books I'm somewhat unsure. But believe me that time is not far off. I tell people on the courses I give that the half-life of the course-content is typically 18 months (and no this is not a cynical way to secure repeat-business from them in 18 months time).

To be honest, these days I rarely refer to my collection of traditional dead-tree-edition books - mainly because they're all rather old [believe me, a five-year-old biochemistry pharmacology or legal textbook is not only amusing, it's positively *dangerous*].

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I'm not talking about technical education here. I still firmly believe that real education requires a grounding in the humanities: history, literature, and social science. Electronic media alone have not begun to encompass those fields because there's not enough "profit" in it for the producers and distributors.

Technical education, or specialized fields such as law, have now moved into the range where I agree, they can be managed largely without printed matter.

A world in which education no longer includes an adequate exposure to the humanities, however, is going to be a cold, nasty, and brutish world indeed. I don't want to live in it, nor do I want to contribute to its development.

[megadog.livejournal.com]

I'm quite happy to put the teaching of 'hard' science, economics and law ahead of the "soft" stuff [humanities, classical literature, subjective interpretations of history].

Even in the sphere of what many would call 'pulp fiction' these days the primary distribution-channel is invariably electronic.

If Shakespeare were alive today he'd be making his living writing scripts for The Wire.

[zenicurean.livejournal.com]

So their plan is to project "data from the Internet." Instead of having an actual library with actual books. But no, because apparently the absolute single most vital thing they could have can be replaced with "three large flat-screen TVs".

This is beyond ridiculous. In fact, it's fast approaching tragic, and I mean tragic in the no-nonsense, dynasty-collapsing, old-school Greek sense of the word. I can't even begin to describe how patently idiotic this is. I mean, what is this? What is this rubbish?

[canid-anubis.livejournal.com]

I'd have to admit that the library is one of the places I really look at when I consider what school to send my kid to. I've told her many times that all of the real learning that I considered I had done in public school was done on my own, in the library. And as you point out, often that might be done by simply wandering the rows and seeing what jumps out at you and not having been limited to what key words that I knew I was looking for on the net.
I can not fathom, what with all the people that would happily donate books to a school library, that there should ever be cause not to have one, even if they only had a real librarian once a week.

Lastly, as an aside, books are simply something that a lot of the underprivlidged don't have access to any other way. There was a poor urban youth, 3rd grader that didn't read well, a few years ago in a school where my wife was PTA pres. One of the mothers was telling her about this kid and how a teacher caught him red handed with a book shoved in his waistband as he was trying to steal it from the library and how they simply didn't need that sort of kid in their school. The mother was hoping that they'd suspend him and make an example. My wife asked me what I'd do. I said that I'd have given the kid the book and written it off. But as that wasn't likely to fly, I'd have gotten the kid to sign out the book directly, let him have it, and then see if there wasn't a way to get him a bag of similar books to help him with his reading and to foster that interest, all the while explaining that stealing is wrong, of course.

But to tell all those kids that don't have PCs, and might not have a convienient public library, etc, that they are no longer able to have books as a resource would be a real crime. To deny them the smell of old books, the tangible feeling of someone's story or work reaching fruition, to keep them from learning how to research via paper, film or fiche vs. text, that's as annoying to me as teachers no longer teaching cursive to kids. I can only imagine how much more annoying it is for you :)

[altivo.livejournal.com]

The sad answer is, it's the US in action as world leader and trend-setter, of course. The nation where profitability comes before any other value in all facets of life. Where appearance counts more than substance.

Over the last year or two I've watched a struggling nearby college, one that has been in operation for over a century, as it systematically pillaged its library. They sold off the rare books first because they needed money. Then the reference books (because it's all on the internet, you know.) Eventually they were selling off the furniture and the artwork that had been donated to the library by alumni over the decades. The latest? They've stopped the funds for purchasing any new library materials at all, in order to use them to improve the appearance of buildings elsewhere on campus with paint and other superficials. (Not even critical repairs like leaky roofs or the potholes in their pavement.)

I suspected you'd be in agreement with me on this. I'm surprised, though, at the large number of people (most of them under 30) who don't think it matters at all. This is a very bad thing in my opinion.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Yep. And yet, a lot of folks seem to think I'm just being defensive about my job. That is hardly the case. I'm within a few years of retirement age anyway, so it won't matter to me in that respect.

What does matter to me is that the internet is ephemeral and incomplete. Sure, you can read Shakespeare off the net if you really want to, but what about Lionel Johnson? What about Gerard Manley Hopkins (not his poems, those are probably out there, but his history of Hawaii?) What about the letters of Mark Twain or Thomas Jefferson? The poems of Badger Clark or Banjo Patterson?

The sheer volume of our literary and historical heritage still is largely absent from electronic formats, and even if someone values it enough to convert it all (like Project Gutenberg) we won't be seeing even half of it there for many years yet.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Perhaps, but in that case Shakespeare would also have been forgotten probably within his own lifetime.

[canid-anubis.livejournal.com]

But you also have to consider the simply annonymity factor that books, and being able to borrow books, lend to the reader as well.
Dump the books and THEY'll be better at being able to watch all that one does read, access, and is exposed to as well as further censor or tweak when they feel need be.
It definately isn't a fun thing to consider.

[zenicurean.livejournal.com]

That's, quite frankly, a little terrifying. I seldom get out of sorts, but it's just that this bit of news raises my heckles.

I don't fault the technology for being there, of course, and I don't think anyone else does, either. But really, the Internet? They're going to depend exclusively on the digitised material that's now available on the Internet? I cannot vouch for technical fields like engineering, but as it stands, the Internet doesn't accommodate the needs of humanities nearly enough to be considered a viable replacement for the actual physical stuff. I don't think the people who believe it is an acceptable replacement, or who believe relying solely on digital archives is simply an inconvenience for humanities, really understand the sheer magnitude of what they're saying.

I'd hate to be parochial, but I see this in history sometimes. People consistently underestimate the sheer level of stuff there is yet to digitise. They conceive of historical work as always being based on a few scraps of paper here, a plowshard there, some bits and pieces from which professional speculators derive wild guesses. It's impossible to relate to these people how unfathomably monumental the work of digitising primary sources alone is going to be. It's the same sort of thing with shelf-space. Folks used to having just the new and the fresh stuff on hand, and everything else in storage, usually feel miffed that people like me go around insisting on having lots of stuff on hand that is... well, old like the bones of the earth.

But we both know humanities (and in many cases economics, I dare say) doesn't age the way material ages in fields like medicine, physics, engineering or chemistry. A book on pharmacology fifty years old is useless; a philosophical or theological treatise fifty years old -- a hundred years old, two hundred years old -- is research material. Anybody who wants to run out and switch to what they've finished digitising thus far is in for a rude awakening; anyone who genuinely intends to relying exclusively on it is, for the time being, pretty much doomed.

[zenicurean.livejournal.com]

They sold off the rare books first because they needed money.

And I suppose I should mention this almost sent shivers down my spine. No matter how shaken the spine, or no matter how smudged the covers, everything from the make of the paper and the type of the ink to the details on the ex libris on these things tells a story. While I'm happy we're getting more networks, and consider them a positive development as a whole, that's one thing they can never do. They can't relate the characteristics of a book as an artifact.

[zenicurean.livejournal.com]

And heck, I'd rather get a cup of coffee and go sit on a bench somewhere reading a convenient, physical book, rather than hauling a lap-top everywhere I go.

[songdogmi.livejournal.com]

There's so much that would be lost in a world with a digital-only library. One of my biggest concerns has been how poorly laid-out digital books and reference might be. There are valuable clues to the formatting of text that help readers comprehend the material. But that's the sort of thing web browsers don't do well yet, and that are compromised by all the do-it-yourselfers and computer programmers who are untrained in layout and design. Maybe the digital tools and the skills of those who wield them will someday come up to the task. It's dicey, though.

Not to mention that, if the electricity goes out, a digital book isn't even good for a paperweight.

That's not to discount the sensual physicality of the books, not in the least. I'm trying, in my head, to play devil's advocate, just to understand the issue. In a world where the intricacies of Mozart's or Bach's composition are becoming less appreciated, or where sporting achievements unaided by chemical supplements are no longer valued, getting young people—any people (that Boston headmaster ain't that young)—to appreciate the sight and smell and feel of a roomful of books might be a Sisyphean task. As long as we have our libraries for our own use, is it just as well to leave the modern world to its follies? ... gawd that sounds pessimistic.

I'm just reminded of part of the PBS commercial for the Ken Burns National Parks: America's Best Idea program, where the narrator (think it's still author Nevada Barr, here) tells of a tourist who comes up to the Yosemite park ranger and asks "I only have an hour to see Yosemite... if you had an hour, what would you do?" And the ranger says "If I only had an hour, I would go over there, sit on that rock, and I'd cry." I'm not the biggest library patron, and I do have a horse in the race as I spend my workdays typesetting books, but in a world without physical books in libraries (or bookstores), I'd probably sit on a rock and cry a lot.

[canid-anubis.livejournal.com]

"If I only had an hour, I would go over there, sit on that rock, and I'd cry."

What a perfect response :)

[keeganfox.livejournal.com]

It's so much easier to control the masses when they depend on you for the information they "need". Why think for yourself when the system tell you what you need to know?

[merik.livejournal.com]

It's a troubling trend. I've seen many of the same arguments used to justify the closing of university's Physical Sciences Library at the end of this year in an attempt to help close the budget gap - "Oh, it's all just science, and all that stuff is online, so there's no need for actual printed books/journals". Although online references have their uses, I'm all in favor of physical, hardcopy reference material, for many reasons. Every science department has argued against the closing, and rightfully so, but all the administration can see is that online "solution" to part of their budget crisis...

[songdogmi.livejournal.com]

I borrowed that for a lot of occasions ... it has been a useful phrase lately, unfortunately.

[equusmaximus.livejournal.com]

It's certainly a sad day when you hear about things like this. While I haven't been the greatest library patron myself the last few years (just waaaaayyy too busy!) I always kept my library card dues paid up, just in case. When I was younger, I practically lived in the library, either at school or at one of the public libraries.

Wasn't it the massive libary of Alexandria that was destroyed by the Romans? How much knowledge was lost there, and how far back did that set Humanity as a result? You would think that Scholars, of all people, would recognize the fallacy of their actions.

"It's all in the Internet" indeed. Who needs The Encyclopedia Britannica when you have Wikipedia? :P

[altivo.livejournal.com]

This is the difference between people who think of the entire world only in terms of profits and balance sheets and those who believe that when we forget history we just make the same mistakes over and over and over...

I can't tell you how many people of all ages up to about 40 I've run into now who simply do not read anything unless they are forced to do so. Not only do they not read themselves, but they sneer at those who do, calling them "impractical" or "wimps" or "eggheads." I heard a lot of that when I was in high school, but thought it would go away in college, where everyone reads, right? Oh yeah, right. Literacy is out of fashion. It's considered old, boring, and irrelevant.

Knowing Shakespeare won't help you get a job as a corporate executive in most cases. Therefore, you shouldn't have to "waste" your time on Shakespeare. That's the widespread attitude in the US today. Never mind the fact that knowing the meaning of Shakespeare may well be relevant to employee relations, business negotiations, or corporate ethics. Who needs ethics? We can make more money by being unethical, after all.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

The Kindle is actually quite a nice tool. So, for that matter, is the older Ebookwise reader that I actually own. It can serve as a fairly usable substitute for a printed book, and the gadget holds a LOT of books at once. The Ebookwise also has a ten hour battery life and a backlit display. Gadgets can be sexy.

On the other paw, these gadgets pretty much limit the reader to what is made available in the proper formats for them. To many people, what's already available in portable e-book format seems like a world of literature. In truth, though, it is nothing of the sort. It's a selection of materials that can be counted on to make a profit for Amazon or other dealers. It is by no means complete or balanced. And, as pointed out above, it can easily be manipulated by advertising or selective marketing.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Yes, it's an accurate and highly appropriate response. Undoubtedly the person to whom it was made considered it "rude and unhelpful" just as people consider me "rude and unhelpful" when I tell them that I can't teach them to use a computer and read the entire worldwide web in 30 minutes or less.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Yes, why think indeed when you can be entertained by FOX network and their inflammatory commentators? Therein lies the rub: It is much easier to not think than it is to actually think for oneself.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Ugly news. And I thought you were at one of the more respectable universities, too. Don't accreditation associations look askance at this sort of thing?