I’ve got a bit of a confession to make. I Love Libraries. Not E-Readers, online repositories, over-used class book sets, or glorified literacy-encouragement tools (although all of these are useful and have their place) … I mean *actual* bricks-and-mortar books-and-more-books storehouses of knowledge and facilitators of learning.
I grew up in libraries; still live in one today; and am resolutely of the opinion that having easy access to literally tens of thousands of tomes on just about every subject conceivable was vital for a younger Curwen’s learning and personal development.
It was therefore a cause for considerable surprise, shock and dismay when I was contacted by a teacher-librarian working at a local secondary school about proposed changes to the way the National Library system works.
In years past, teachers and librarians have been able to supplement the resources directly available to them by hitting up the National Library through Curriculum Services and ordering supply-crates of often highly specialized books for classroom use. If you’re outside the education system, such a facility may not sound like much; but in my own experience – and those of the educational professionals I’ve talked to – it’s proven invaluable in ensuring our kids have access to the information they need in a format that’s useful and accessible to them.
And no, despite Peter Dunne’s protestations to the contrary, you can’t just expect kids to make do solely by trying to track down and access information via the internet.
While I fully applaud the National Library making greater use of digital vectors to enable students and teachers to access its resources; the decision from on high that this approach should be pursued at the expense of having physical books available for dispatch to where they are needed strikes me as being less about making sure our kids get the informational support they need … and more to do with the fact that kids reading books via the internet costs the government less than sending crates of books around the place. (The net fiscal impact of the policy as a whole is a rather theoretical saving of $392,000)
In an ideal world (which, given who’s in power, this obviously isn’t), the National Library would be pursuing a “both” rather than “either” approach which didn’t blithely assume all students, schools and classrooms were equally able to make use of online or digital resources. Despite the government pushing “e-learning” and “digital literacy” as educational mantras with all the fervor of somebody who’s willing to try *absolutely anything* other than properly paying and valuing teachers as a means to boost educational outcomes, not every child has access to a digital device in the classroom, and not every classroom has reliable ongoing access to the internet. This is particularly the case for schools in rural and lower-decile areas, who may find themselves effectively double-penalized by the relative paucity and difficulty of access to equivalently resourced alternative libraries in their home communities.
Unfortunately for whichever bureaucrat or bouffant-wearer dreamed up the policy, I’m not even sure this shift away from the provision of physical resources will actually save the government money. As the School Library Association of New Zealand thoughtfully points out, the system that’s been in place for the previous aeon made economic sense because it had the high-use and high-demand books required year-round and in bulk (whether fiction or non-fiction) being bought by schools and school libraries to be used immediately and extensively by their students. The National Library, by contrast, concentrated its efforts on acquiring the specialized and supplementary materials that individual schools were likely to only require in small numbers (if at all), and far less frequently.
The new system, by contrast, will reportedly feature the National Library buying up masses of popular fiction in print copy to be shipped round the country in the name of fostering “reading engagement” (something school libraries do anyway, and with the added bonus of not having to wait for other schools to return the resources first), leaving schools to purchase the less frequently used and almost invariably rather expensive specialist texts required to fully support the NZ Curriculum.
Even setting aside the obvious issues with having the stuff that’s going to be ubiquitously in-demand and over-subscribed year-round kept at a central repository and only available to a given school on a rotational basis, a moment’s consideration will reveal how this new approach makes little to no sense from either a librarian’s perspective or an accountant’s – let alone from that of the poor, long-suffering teacher!
Given the number of obvious issues and oversights with this policy, it should surprise absolutely no one that it appears to have been developed without a single iota of consultation with either schools or school librarians. Sadly, this kind of callous disregard for the input and perspective of education professionals is part and parcel of National’s approach to making decisions concerning the education sector.
The National Library – and, for that matter, the presence of books in schools – is both a treasure and a treasure-trove. Attempts to relegate either to the past in the name of a few cheap savings would be (to borrow a phrase Peter Dunne used to describe his critics on this matter) “comical if they were not so tragic.“
It is said of the great Michel de Montaigne that “he took up books as though they were people, and welcomed them into his family”.
National, taking books from the kids for no reason and give extra licenses to gamblers. What a joke this country is becoming!
Take from the poor and most needy
Give to the rich and the most greed
So our fear is they are using the German pre-war model known to have been the most effective way of capturing the minds and hearts of a entire population ahead of a large scale political change, and we are disturbed as to what that major secretive change this Government has still secretly hiding from the public.
They’re doing all this on purpose. Books make people clever. Clever people have an annoying habit of seeing through disingenuous government schemes and making a fuss about it.
And we can’t have that now, can we?
I agree it was in a library that I first read about New Zealand First and Simonovich fisheries.
Finally a Curwen post without so much ** **. This one was actually readable.
Interesting. Very interesting.
So sad – obviously whoever they got in to bring in this bright idea obviously knows nothing of how the National Library works (wonder how much they were paid to come up with this stupid, expensive ‘reimagining’ of this wonderful teaching resource.) One hopes this isn’t an underhanded act to help make school libraries go the way of school swimming pools.
My education didn’t come so much from school but from books from THE LIBRARY.
School taught me how to access information, taught me about history, taught me about peoples of the world and the places they lived, school taught me how to add ,subtract and handle money,
school taught me how to spell and use the correct grammer.
School taught me discipline.
School taught me learning was something that continues through life ,not something to enable the passing of exams which involved more memorising than anything else.
Most children today have access to computors and internet information but this information is someone’s opinion not really actual knowledge.
The information can be used to shape the minds of pupils and is often the information governments want the pupils to rely on .
Books contain so much more than just a few lines of information based on someone’s opinion. Books contain the mysteries of the world, in depth.
Books contain fantasy and reality, a reason to engage the pupil in imagination and thinking outside the box ,forming their own opinion,not parroting someone else’s ideas.
So many children today cant spell .cant see the meaning of words in the context of the sentence.Children of today cant add up without the calculator.
Books can get pupils to learn to discriminate between truth and lies,thing’s not available online but in the quiet of home in the pages of a book .
If the power shuts down,if the internet is shut down ,or if certain things the government dosnt want pupils to know can be deleted at a touch of a button, this is not education but control.
A book can be read by candlelight ,or torch .Get rid of books and the government has you at their mercy.
In olden times the poor people were not allowed to have or learn to read books,only the rich and priestly classes had access.
This government seems intent on going back to those days to save money.
Education today is to dumb down and shape childrens thinking to comply with government ideology.
Discipline is missing and allows pupils to run riot and stop teachers teaching, and the interested pupil to miss out on learning because of disruption to the class by class clowns who want the attention of others,they wont learn and neither will allow other pupils .the option to learn
Books are the means of learning without disruption. Books can be chosen by children to suit their interests and give the knowledge not available to them in a school with curriculums constantly changing at the whim of government ministers agenda , agendas driven by PC correctness,and the need to save money for their leader, not driven by the need to educate children to compete in todays world.
Soon the internet will be controlled,what price education then Peter Dunne.?
The National Govt represents a final sale of our assets and autonomy. The rulers National represents don’t think we need knowledge but we need libraries like Prague https://www.facebook.com/scienze.fanpage/posts/731162200324344 and a higher value on learning and a government that actually serves us.
Comments are closed.