Wednesday, 8 January 2025
A library without books
Steven Tucker has an interesting Mercator piece on the dumbing down of libraries. I haven't visited a library for decades, originally because they never seemed to have books I wished to read, so I enjoyed the serendipity of bookshop browsing instead. Now I read online articles and essays or Kindle books.
A library without books is like a book without pages
Just before Christmas here on Mercator, I bemoaned a new report from the UK’s National Literacy Trust, demonstrating that fewer British children now enjoyed reading for pleasure than at any point since surveys had begun. In that article, I blamed dumbed-down teaching in schools, and asinine online phenomena like BookTok.
But possibly there is another culprit: libraries. Libraries are meant to make children like books, not hate them. But, in seeking to fulfil this first laudable remit in a rather wrong-headed way, are librarians today all too often doing the precise reverse?
Taking a swipe at the wrong problem
There is a disturbing new phenomenon afoot – babies and toddlers are turning up at nurseries and schools not knowing what books are, or how to use them. Used to being dumped before web-connected tablets and iPads by lazy parents, tots are attempting to turn real books’ pages simply by “swiping” them with their fingers, or holding them upside-down, thinking their pages will automatically flip the right way up, like the clever screen-displays on e-devices.
The whole piece is well worth reading, not only because the decline of libraries may be a disaster, but also because it may not be. For lifelong avid readers it is tempting to see the trend in a wholly negative way, but I can't think how libraries would tempt me back apart from opening a decent coffee shop.
Losing the plot
The gamification of public libraries is now big business worldwide. I found a whole 2022 academic paper, “Investigating the role of gamification in public libraries’ literacy-centred youth programming”, about the subject. Here, it is shown how, in many Western libraries, special, expensively-made kids’ sections have of late been installed, where “closed off corners in the basement that once housed the children’s stacks [of books] have been replaced with state-of-the-art, multi-level exploration zones, some complete with Willie Wonka-type installations, theatrical performances, and even [giant model] dinosaurs.”
Great! But … doesn’t that just mean you’ve replaced most of the books with miniature theme-park attractions instead?
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8 comments:
It's exactly the same as the Church of England has done. A judgement was made that the public - the young public, primarily - are not interested in the traditional product because sales are declining. So a decision is made to start selling something that's more like the stuff the youngsters do buy, but of course they can't make it as well. So the youngsters don't buy it.
I spend my best years in "Edutainment", and it's the worst of both worlds.
As I saw somewhere recently:
"In 100 years, we have gone from teaching Latin and Greek in high school to teaching remedial English in college"
I'm happy with the replacement of Latin for all but enthusiasts (I dumped it as soon as I could) but it does rather depend on what you use to replace it. More Statistics, Set Theory, and Linear Algebra is my view but no doubt there will be those who would argue for more Conic Sections and Spherical Trigonometry.
Sam - it's difficult to imagine what the Church of England could have done to stop the rot. A focus on the interests of younger people may have been a mistake, but there was no obvious alternative to avoid the spectre of decline.
dearieme - more statistics and economics would have been useful, if only to arm more people against political shenanigans.
Way back in the mid 50s an important milestone for me was getting my very first library card, when my mother took me to the local library. I think that I had to be maybe eleven. There was no Children's section. All books were purely segregated by category, subject, and then alphabetically by author.
By then through school and home I, and all other children, and adults, had learned to respect books. So a hard backed book lasted for years.
Having the pick of all the books, four books at a time, I read, and tried to understand them all. I became knowledgeable in Greek, Roman, Norse and Celtic mythology ; astronomy ( helped by living in an area with no light pollution -street lighting went off at 11:00 pm) ; Swift, Dickens, RL Stevenson and Science Fiction ( At that time not polluted by Fantasy). And many more.
And now I prefer to read a printed blog than listen to a spoken one.
I am very grateful for a mother's guidance and example, my earnest teachers and the simple town library.
For me, it’s the nature of children’s literature today through Woke library staff which is the main issue … we’ve written on it much.
Doonhamer - your experience seems similar to mine. I read all kinds of books, particularly anything with an imaginative technical or scientific theme such as old style science fiction. A book I particularly remember was Wheels of Fortune by Coutts Brisbane.
https://akhaart.blogspot.com/2011/08/wheels-of-fortune.html
James - and even some modern editions of older literature are being edited to remove "potentially offensive" words.
Is it really a problem in the grand scheme of things, if books get left behind and young people move to newer technologies?
As long as children can read (And de read byond guff on Tik Tok), does it matter how they read?
Children can't use rotary telephones, fax machines or dial up modems, but they can still do the things you would do on those items, just with different tech.
I would hate to see books disappear, as I read a lot of them and like to keep a sizeable library at home, but I know that as long as I want to read books, they will be available.
The main thing I think with kids, is the dumbing down element. Only being able to concentrate on Twitter sized sentances or Tik Tok length videos. If they are still getting educational content from tablets and phones, maybe that's all that really matters?
Bucko - it's not easy to know, but we'll probably find out how important reading is and it may be that online is just as good, but online is extremely distracting too. Yet there many be something we haven't thought of which acts as a substitute for reading books, the trouble is, there may be no substitute.
What strikes me as potentially significant is how narrow and remarkably dim our younger politicians seem to be.
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