Purchases declined today
Apr. 8th, 2008 12:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
altivoBeing "the" reference librarian means I get all the flyers (and phone calls) trying to sell us new reference books. A few years ago this was fun. You got to see new shiny books and even buy them once in a while. The prices for library reference books are outrageously high, but even so, we could justify buying some of them.
In today's mail (real paper mail, with glossy color brochures!) I received sales offers for several new encyclopedias of animal life from Facts on File. These look gorgeous. All color photos throughout, with detailed articles on virtually all major species. There's a set for birds, a set for mammals, and a set for aquatic life. The writing is aimed at junior high reading levels. It would strain our budget to buy these (about $2000 for the three sets) but there's no point anyway. We can't even force a kid or even an adult to look at a printed reference book any more. The schools are reinforcing this behavior, so that they come to us and demand to use Google. Instead of reading an article written by a zoological expert in order to do their report on "tigers" they just Google for "tiger" and take whatever comes to the top of the debris. The really horrifying thing about that for me is that the schools are not teaching any kind of discernment as to the quality of the information, instead claiming that they are teaching "computer literacy" by encouraging kids to use Google instead of the reference books.
Anyway, no encyclopedias of animal life for us. Sigh.
Another batch of flyers were easier for me to pass up, not because the books aren't good, I'm sure they are, but because I know they'd never be opened here. These were from Routledge, and were encyclopedias of various world religions. I'd love to leaf through them, but I'll have to go to a really big library to do so:
Encyclopedia of Buddhism 924 pages, $250.00
Encyclopedia of Hinduism 1086 pages, $225.00
Sufism 4 vols., 1600 pages, $1043.00
Encyclopedia of Taoism 2 vols., 1300 pages, $315.00
Encyclopedia of the Historical Jesus 705 pages, first of four vols., $165.00
One might think that the last title would find some interest, but it won't and for the same reason that the others will not. We have no one interested in actually studying this sort of material. The adults' minds are already made up, and they don't want to hear anything that might contradict their set opinions. Furthermore, some will object strenuously to the idea of letting children see any of this lest it "give them ideas." It's all very sad. Allan Bloom was right when he wrote The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students except that he didn't go far enough. It's American cultural values that have done this, and the educational system is only a reflection of that larger problem.
In today's mail (real paper mail, with glossy color brochures!) I received sales offers for several new encyclopedias of animal life from Facts on File. These look gorgeous. All color photos throughout, with detailed articles on virtually all major species. There's a set for birds, a set for mammals, and a set for aquatic life. The writing is aimed at junior high reading levels. It would strain our budget to buy these (about $2000 for the three sets) but there's no point anyway. We can't even force a kid or even an adult to look at a printed reference book any more. The schools are reinforcing this behavior, so that they come to us and demand to use Google. Instead of reading an article written by a zoological expert in order to do their report on "tigers" they just Google for "tiger" and take whatever comes to the top of the debris. The really horrifying thing about that for me is that the schools are not teaching any kind of discernment as to the quality of the information, instead claiming that they are teaching "computer literacy" by encouraging kids to use Google instead of the reference books.
Anyway, no encyclopedias of animal life for us. Sigh.
Another batch of flyers were easier for me to pass up, not because the books aren't good, I'm sure they are, but because I know they'd never be opened here. These were from Routledge, and were encyclopedias of various world religions. I'd love to leaf through them, but I'll have to go to a really big library to do so:
Encyclopedia of Buddhism 924 pages, $250.00
Encyclopedia of Hinduism 1086 pages, $225.00
Sufism 4 vols., 1600 pages, $1043.00
Encyclopedia of Taoism 2 vols., 1300 pages, $315.00
Encyclopedia of the Historical Jesus 705 pages, first of four vols., $165.00
One might think that the last title would find some interest, but it won't and for the same reason that the others will not. We have no one interested in actually studying this sort of material. The adults' minds are already made up, and they don't want to hear anything that might contradict their set opinions. Furthermore, some will object strenuously to the idea of letting children see any of this lest it "give them ideas." It's all very sad. Allan Bloom was right when he wrote The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students except that he didn't go far enough. It's American cultural values that have done this, and the educational system is only a reflection of that larger problem.
