I Am Proof Libraries are Critical to Solving Cultural Poverty via Toronto Star

I am proof libraries are critical to solving cultural poverty

Libraries are one of the major tools we have, like education, that allow the underprivileged to overcome their condition.

Toronto Star: 1.15.2018 by Bobby A Aubé, Maison de la littérature in Quebec City

When I was a child, my mother sat with my brother and I every night to read with us. Books were thus among the first windows through which we observed the world.

It was before the divorce and the bankruptcy. Before we lost the house with a good part of what it contained. The following years were difficult financially. To help, my father started volunteering in a soup kitchen where we would frequently eat.

In Quebec City, the public library in my neighbourhood was just across the street and our father, for whom cultural education was essential, took us there after meals. Each time we borrowed a stack of books and comics for the week.

=I believe it was at this time that I understood, even unconsciously, that there are at least two distinct forms of poverty in our societies. The first one, of course, is financial poverty: it is the one preventing us from meeting our basic needs, such as housing, food or clothing. The other one is more insidious, because it undermines children’s development at the base. It is also a cause of our high rates of school dropouts or functional illiteracy: cultural poverty.

Fortunately for my brother and me, our parents understood that the library is precisely countering this kind of poverty. Those who have already been interested in the “UNESCO Public Library Manifesto” probably know how the role of a library goes beyond its basic services. Its mission is also, for instance, to create “reading habits in children from an early age”, to help citizens acquire “computer literacy skills”, or to foster “intercultural dialogue and [favour] cultural diversity.”  READ MORE  >>