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December 2, 2008
A school library
Congratulations to David Campbell, publisher of the Everyman's Library for this excellent letter to Lynn Asquith, head teacher of the Meadows School in Chesterfield which is making its librarian redundant and closing its library.
(And thanks to Alan Gibbons for sending a copy)
Dear Ms Asquith,
I was surprised and shocked to read of the decision to close the school library in your school.
Great books are the DNA of our civilisation. Surely all children should have access to such books as they are growing up or when they are at school? I donated 250 books from Everyman’s Library to every state secondary school in the UK, including Meadows Community School, between 1998-2005. Authors ranged from Homer to Roald Dahl, Raymond Chandler and Garcia Marquez.
Clearly many pupils will ignore these books and not use them, but if one or two pupils, possibly from homes where there are no books on the shelves in every school in every year (and these books will last 50 or more years) have their lives and horizons enlarged this gift will have been worthwhile. The letters we received suggest that many more are benefiting. Many of us were
lucky to find a teacher or school librarian who pointed us to books well outside the curriculum. To deny this service to pupils seems madness.
If you persist in this extraordinary and deeply wrong decision please will you return the Everyman Millennium Library to Grantham Book Services, Alma Park Industrial Estate, Isaac Newton Way, Grantham, Lincs NG31 9SD, since it was a condition of this gift that you would display the books in your library. We are besieged by schools who were ineligible as well as by
schools in Africa who would like these books and they will be recycled.
Yours sincerely,
David Campbell
Copies to:
Philip Pullman
Ed Balls MP
Beverley Hughes MP
Jim Knight MP
Paul Holmes MP
Baroness Morgan of Drefelin
Sarah McCarthy-Fry MP
Posted by Perkins at December 2, 2008 6:19 PM
Comments
Sounds like we could do with David Campbell heading up the MLA.
Posted by: Amanda Field at December 3, 2008 8:37 AM
That school has no idea of the way in which knowledge is gained. It is worse than naive to let pupils assume that everything is on the internet. That way leads to a gobbet mentality.
I have just been writing on William Gibson, not the cyberspace wallah but the playwright (The Miracle Worker), and sought out his little-known but terrific memoir A Mass for the Dead. Nobody can begin to appreciate him without that book - but of course it's not on the web. Such examples can be instanced a billionfold.
Meanwhile, any publisher could do well to reissue his corker of a novel The Cobweb: even now one might blush to quote some of the steamy passages
(although a teacher could usefully do so to illustrate dextrous use of the semi-colon).
Posted by: Christopher Hawtree at December 3, 2008 11:30 AM
Just this morning, I watched a piece of BBC news filler about school libraries hosted by the usual buffed and smooth as brylcreem moppet. He started off by saying something like "of course, we can't imagine school libraries without computers..."
Well, I can! What's worse, a comment I put on here some months ago about school libraries gave rise to the response that, surprise, surprise, school libraries were indeed sacking their librarians and getting rid of their books. As "punishment", schoolkids were even "deprived" of IT and sent to read books in the library. I wish someone had punished me like that! The BBC filler raised concerns about the security of school computers. Shock! Horror! The little twerps are looking at porn instead of behaving themselves. Well, they're the next generation, they've grown up with them and they will always find a way around the security. You've opened up Pandora's Box and it cannot be closed, but rather than realise that computers are part but not all of the future it seems like people (typified by that urbane berk on the box) are becoming ever more narrow-minded. So they can't imagine schools without computers, can they? Perhaps if they had read some good fiction instead of gluing themselves to Google they might be able to.
We really have entered Ronald Searle's era of robot ant boys, and it sickens me.
Posted by: James Christie at December 3, 2008 11:59 AM