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The books that matter aren’t in the library
I know this is going to sound like a walked-uphill-two-miles-both-ways-to-school-in-a-blizzard story, but this Globe and Mail article made me do it. It concerns People for Education’s annual lament about the decline of school librarians.
I know what I learned when I went to school in a northern Ontario town in the fifties and sixties, and I know what my children learned when they went to school in the eighties and nineties and, trust me, I got a far superior education. My impression is that today’s public school kids are getting about the same as what my kids got 10-15 years ago, that is to say they too are being cheated.
Yet my elementary schools had no library, let alone a dedicated librarian. They also lacked a gym, a school nurse, consultants, subject specialists, a vice-principal, ESL teachers, secretaries, teaching assistants, resource teachers, money for field trips - indeed all the staff they had were classroom teachers, a janitor, and a principal. Class sizes were in the range of 35-40. And yet we were all taught and we all learned.
To me it’s ridiculous to play the violin about kids who can’t learn as well because they don’t have access to a school librarian. If People for Education really cared about kids’ education, they would be focusing on the things that really matter - teaching methods and materials.
I thought the same things when I read the article this morning. I thought of the big classrooms, with 40 odd students or so, and the shelfs below the black boards were well stock with books in each classroom. It was the days where children’s books were inexpensive, and within reach of the majority of parents. Books got traded back and forth, comic books were cheap, as well as newspapers and magazines. I probably got off to a good start, with Life Magazine, reading the captions below the pictures. At the age of 6 and 7, I was already forming knowledge on some important issues. I never could understand why I never got a black doll that I requested every year based mainly on the Life issues of the black riots and conditions of the black in the United States.
Today, who can afford to supply their children with all I had in reading material, based on a blue-collar salary, slightly higher for the trades as my father was? In the end, after my musings I thought P4E should be concentrating on the real issues of curriculum and instruction, and not the bells and whistles.
Speaking about bells and whistles, due to only one service provider for telephone service - complaints of service always swung to the bell and whistles. Nothing was ever done dealing with static on the line, or from time to time, other issues dealing with service. If one needed phone repair, a two week wait period, and the list goes on. The day the cable company walk into town, offering phone service people switch for better service, and the bonus was a savings of $40.00 per month. The moral to the story, the telephone company concentrated on the bells and whistles, ignoring service and maintenance, and the cable company concentrated on service and maintenance and updating - the bells and whistles came after. The telephone company has almost a zero change of regaining their customers, because they never concentrating on servicing the needs of their customers.
The same can be applied to the education system, and all their bells and whistles, but no service, maintenance and timely updating that makes financial sense. All I ever wanted was my child to learn to become a fair to good reader, writer and have a firm foundation in numeracy, but all my child got was the bells and whistles and not her education needs, that were essential in her learning.