How to weather the Trump administration :: Head to the library

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How to weather the Trump administration: Head to the library

LA Times: 11.10.2016 by David Kipen

Even now, in this riven country, after this whole entropically hideous year, most Americans still agree on at least one institution. Mercifully, it’s the one that may just save us: the public library.

Hear me out. In small towns and large, in red states and blue, libraries poll better across the political spectrum than any public trust this side of the fire department. In districts where millage increases don’t require a two-thirds vote (and frequently where they do, as in California) modest library bonds usually win.

If, as he claims, our new president really wants to invest in infrastructure, then America will need to build more than just roads and bridges. If Donald Trump is as smart as he insists he is, then he can prove it by strengthening our intellectual infrastructure. That means libraries — and he can start with one audacious symbolic act.

I’ve looked at libraries from at least four sides now, as a full-time book critic, a federal grantmaker (in a red administration!), a nonprofit lending librarian in an immigrant, working-class neighborhood, and on the faculty at UCLA. While midwifing the nonpartisan NEA’s one-city-one-book program, The Big Read, I visited more than 100 public libraries in 40-some states, with a fat deck of library cards in my desk now to prove it.

If all these experiences have taught me anything, it’s that librarians may be the only first responders holding the line between America and a raging national pandemic of absolutism. More desperately than ever, we need our libraries now, and all three of their traditional pillars: 1) education, 2) good reading and 3) the convivial refuge of a place apart. In other words, libraries may be the last coal we have left to blow on.

All the research out there — Census data, NEA reports, the Pew Research Center’s work on libraries and reading in low-income neighborhoods — all of it points toward reading enjoyment as the surest predictor of health, wealth and good citizenship. Readers volunteer more, vote more, even exercise more. And a recent Yale study categorically shows what most of us have long suspected: Readers live longer than nonreaders.  READ MORE @

The End of Literacy . . .

The End of Literacy . . .

articles, opinions and comments about literacy and reading habits that have appeared since Howard Gardner's column in the Washington Post (Feb 17 2008)


The End of Literacy? Don't Stop Reading. by Howard Gardner
Washington Post, February 17, 2008

What will happen to reading and writing in our time?

Could the doomsayers be right? Computers, they maintain, are destroying literacy.

The signs -- students' declining reading scores, the drop in leisure reading to just minutes a week, the fact that half the adult population reads no books in a year -- are all pointing to the day when a literate American culture becomes a distant memory. By contract, optimists foresee the Internet ushering in a new, vibrant participatory culture of words. Will they carry the day?

Maybe neither. Let me suggest a third possibility: Literacy -- or an ensemble of literacies -- will continue to thrive, but in forms and formats we can't yet envision. READ ON

~ a reaction from:The National Children's Book and Literacy Alliance

Mr. Gardner's essay is well worth reading, but how long it has been since he has spent any time in public elementary or secondary schools? A challenge for Mr. Gardner-- spend a month working with young people in Worcester,Massachusetts, or in East Cleveland, Ohio, or even any middle class/working class neighborhood public school across the country to see where our nation truly is concerning reading, writing, and education-- to see the state of actual school buildings, school libraries, and public libraries in many parts of our nation. Have a conversation with a real group of kids, ask them what they read, how much they read, when they read anything at all. And then see if he would draw the same conclusions. READ ON

~ issue of schools, school libraries and budget cuts {just a few}

Austin: Libraries short on money, books: Austin school librarians making do with old and moldy books, aging collections.

Modesto: Modesto City’s plan to eliminate junior high school librarians is irrational - Stephan Krashen
California: The Governor plans to cut $5 billion from education over the next 18 months because of the budget crisis. I suggest we accomplish some of this by dumping the High School Exit Exam - Stephen Krashen
South Carolina: Improving the K-12 system is not enough; the greatest oppurtunity lies within adult education.

~ the value of The Big Read or One City, One Book events

Jim Henley’s Los Angeles Times (2/25/08) column: Big Read or Big Waste?
Stephen Krashen’s comment: The Big Read is a bad solution that addresses the wrong problem

a bit of a mashup, catchup sort of post which will end with 2 Gardner titles

Five Minds for the Future
Harvard Business School Press 2007
~ outlines the specific cognitive abilities that will be sought and cultivated by leaders in the years ahead.

Howard Gardner Under Fire
Edited by Jeffrey Schaler, Open Court Press 2006
~ leading experts who disagree with Gardner on specific issues explain their reasons, with no holds barred, and Gardner replies cogently and pungently to each one of them.

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