Remembering Librarianship Past

 What has happened to the time-honoured scholarly side of librarianship? Even in the 1980s, at the UBC School of Librarianship there was still an assumption that librarianship had something to do with books, reading, literacy and scholarship. There was recognition of the historic role of public libraries in extending knowledge free of charge to the populace. Libraries were agents of democracy, free speech, and equal access to information. 

And now, in the 2020s? Judging from the Agenda of the Burnaby Public Library’s Board, libraries are no longer distributors of diverse information but arbiters of “misinformation”. They appoint themselves judge and gatekeeper of what the public should be allowed to read, in print and on-line.

Some libraries have or intend to have Social Workers on staff, as well as extra security staff prepared for “trauma-informed incidents” in the branches. They used to provide research material about drugs and addiction, now they provide the drugs  – onsite. They provide “safety”: safe spaces for the racialized, indigenous, those in need of “equity, diversity and inclusion”, those feeling “harmed” by other people’s ideas, and those needing a whole alphabet to define them (2SLGBTQIA … etc…) but not necessarily the alphabet used by the literate reader.

The public library is now much concerned with mental illness, but in its early days it was a zone of mental health, being a quiet peaceful place where patrons could wander among book shelves, calmly peruse a newspaper, borrow a book from the magical trove of novels, verse, and sundry non-fiction. Every citizen had access to the haven of literature in peaceful civil surroundings – a blessed retreat for those living in crowded quarters or blighted urban ghettos. 

Now the space for books has shrunk, while libraries find space (and budgets) for “non-traditional resources” such as video games, juggling kits, blood pressure cuffs, bike repair kits, radon detectors, vehicle diagnostic scanners, and ukuleles. Seriously. And this despite the fact that fully 48% of Canadians have inadequate literacy skills (according to the Conference Board of Canada). Instead of fretting about non-traditional resources and “non-binary” culture, why don’t libraries concern themselves once more with the literacy/illiteracy duality, and resources for bridging it?

As for novels, librarians now approach them with fear and suspicion in case they harbour non-correct thought or ideas that make others feel “triggered”. To trigger readers is the reason a writer goes to the effort of writing a book in the first place: to trigger imagination, new ideas, open-mindedness. Maybe, instead of appointing themselves the judges and censors of books, librarians should simply stock them all and let readers make up their own minds about them. Never mind "non-traditional resources" – diverse reading is what their taxpayer-based budget is for in the first place.

It’s time for public libraries to return to their core role as protectors of free speech and to be run by librarians, not social workers, not climate action leaders, not thought-police and anti-misinformation crusaders. The public are smart enough to figure out the information wars for themselves – if they can read. According to Statistics Canada, 49% of adult Canadians read below high-school literacy levels – immigrants, indigenous and low-income being the lowest. These are the very groups the library "social work" and mental health mission is particularly targeting. So both schools and public libraries are failing to deliver on their core responsibility: supplying books and advancing literacy.

The Very Detrimental Caterpiller

The world is full of meanings we aren't aware of. "The world is so full of a number of things / we should all be as happy as kings", wrote Robert Louis Stevenson, but the world of thought and ideas is overwhelming and we learn to focus. Out of our tiny focus, we extract our own treasured, and rigid, belief system. Most people narrow their awareness just to get through the day. Maybe it's a safety instinct. We no longer aim for a capacious or well-furnished mind; public school systems certainly don't. People are told they need to "feel safe" and not be "triggered". Too often, other people's ideas are seen as "bullying". 

Hence a renewed book-banning mania. One Canadian school system decided to remove any children's book written before 2008, as "detrimental" for the "marginalized" -- including classics like Anne Frank's Diary, The Very Hungry Caterpiller, Anne of GG, and the Harry Potter series (of course).  Schools were instructed to specially support the Afro-Caribbean and indigenous students, and if that's the new meaning of "inclusive", then schools have problems with word definition. Maybe they'll throw out the Dictionary as well, as something detrimental -- maybe thinking it's as bad as the Very Detrimental Caterpiller. 

When schools give up teaching literacy --

What can we do but stutter and stammer

faced with the overthrow of grammar?

The ivory tower, once well-gated,

is stormed by speech un-articulated,

and Stations of the Cross-out by editor's pen

may never be seen on a page again.

To decipher a sentence is an exercise gnostic

when meaning's as cryptic as initials acrostic.

Antonyms and acronyms make poor kin and kith

and prepositions know not when they're at, to or with.

Ironically, "texting" is the graveyard of text,

while literary stylists ask: what will die next?

People-not-experiencing-adulthood: 'Failure to Strive'

Once, "they came, they strove, they conquered" was an attitude toward growing up, but no more. That old elitist-sounding Shakespearian-Roman literary stuff is totally out of date -- especially in schools. 

Among secondary school students a large proportion (compared to earlier generations) self-identify as disabled. They call themselves stressed, traumatized by life, neuro-variant, or "marginalized" and "challenged" by substance use. (Since schools have been medicating students for behaviour problems for years, it's no surprise if drug-taking comes naturally to them in adulthood.)

Do these students, falling back on the picturesque rainbow of disablement in all its shapes and forms, experience what we might call "failure to strive", a condition analogous to infants' "failure to thrive"? As they approach adulthood do some remain infantile? We're told there's an epidemic of drug use among them. This used to be called "substance abuse" but is now called "people experiencing addiction", as if the experience just happened by itself, like the weather.

Striving used to be considered a requisite for success. Now, in schools it is considered elitist, maybe even colonialist, and has been replaced by counselling, alternative medication, and lowering of academic standards so that no one fails. Striving is demanding. Contemporary education often is not. 

The latest demand of teens approaching graduation, or those "aging out of care", is for a universal minimum income. No striving needed for that. Is the problem not true disablement, but that we are producing a generation of people-not-experiencing-adulthood?

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Project Amnesia

Welcome to Trigger Town 

-- but enter at your own risk. You may see a sign, place-name or something colonial that offends, like a statue, library, court house or legislative building. We're doing our best to get rid of them. History is trouble. A noxious weed. Best to re-write it. 

Should the name “Victoria, BC” survive? It commemorates a Victorian monarch, which triggers PTSD for some. Arguably, native Victorians should have their birth certificates changed. (“Place of Birth: FORMER-Victoria”, like "Former-Yugoslavia) The Province is demanding the federal government come up with COVID funding for this (since history too is a nasty virus.)

Trigger Town will eradicate street names so people don't get a shock every time they read Douglas, Tolmie, Blanshard and Finlayson. Few know anything about the character, achievements, education and dedication of these people (history hasn't actually been taught all that much), but they've got to be disappeared.

Since it's safer to forget than understand History, the education system has launched Project Amnesia, to help students come to proper conclusions (i.e., forget about) the values and accomplishments of "settlers" who had put too much emphasis on things like parliamentary democracy, habeas corpus, education and mass literacy. In the school setting, enquiry is dangerous but group-think is safe, less likely to trigger curiosity or independent ideas. Ideas offend. Best to ban them, inclusively.

Education Comes Down With Absurdity-Virus.

Christmas seems a long time ago (everything pre-COVID seems a long time ago), but I well remember the dire annual Christmas warnings from lifestyle coaches and mental health experts who flooded the media with warnings about the "depression and anxiety" we we're suffering due to "seasonal stress". These experts fell all over each other giving us tips for "survival". What a relief to find when it all died down in the new year that we had survived. How glad the mental health Cassandras must have been to have a new bundle of warnings to issue, when by late February COVID had raised its crowned (corona) head. 

With the lock-down phase came a whole new raft of stresses: isolation, loneliness, financial anxiety, boredom, fear of the future, fear of coming within six feet of others ... Then, the schools were closed. Now they're partially re-opening, but unfortunately the stress-and-anxiety industry is telling parents (and kids) to be fearful and worried -- because it will be "different". 

Telling kids they can't survive something being different, that they're allergic to change, is a recipe for emotional enfeeblement. Tell the kids they'll be fine, and they will be. The desk is in a different place? The hours of attendance have changed? That's not a reason for mental breakdown. But of course to say this is to reveal uncaring insensitivity toward … whoever. Yet someone has to mention the un-mentionable: stiff spines, bravery under bombing, and so on. (You want stress? Ask a WWII survivor.)

Some of us are old enough to remember when kids always lined up at the school door before entering. (Remember not running in the halls??) Being told by a teacher that something's going to be done differently never used to be a reason for a nervous breakdown. Teachers ran classrooms, and students didn't have a daily meltdown when told what to do. Those meltdowns are more contagious than coronavirus, that's for sure. Just see one and the next kid catches it (copies it).

Sitting in rows of desks at a distance instead of clustering around a table for "group work" was routine in the old days, and kids learned to work independently, not to mention to spell, use a pen, read books and do math. A therapist in the emotionology trade recently announced on CBC radio that schools during the COVID partial re-opening must practice "emotion-focused learning". That is code for no learning, or for learning to whine about feelings like the adults around you do.

It would be more reassuring for students to look outside themselves, to study a subject other than "feelings". How about … Geography! Learning where mountains and oceans are, and learning the capitals of ten countries a day. Or history! Memorize the kings and queens of England since 1066 (okay ... of Israel, India, Morocco or whatever ethnic place you favour). Learn how many moons Saturn has, how many substances appear in the Table of Elements (and what an element even is …).

The post-pandemic "new normal" in Education is to avoid the "old normal" of disinterested knowledge. There was already fear that knowing stuff is a privileged, elitist and colonialist affectation that marginalizes those who need to tend to Self due to stress and anxiety. If you shrug and turn your mind to impersonal study, well then you're just stigmatizing … someone.

Whether new or old, the word "normal" comes from "norm", a geometrical term for an exact angle, such as a draughtsman needs to know. A right angle is the norm because there is only one measurably correct right angle. The word "correct" is linked to rectitude of course, and implies standards as well as exactitude, and is therefore not a concept people feel comfortable with. It's not "emotion-focused" or marginalization-concerned. (Interestingly, teachers used to graduate from what was called "Normal School", meaning a college upholding established standards in skills and knowledge.)

But sarcasm aside, it would be helpful for kids to focus on math as something inarguable, measurable and reliable. If they're bobbing around on the sea of adult emotionology, something impersonal and outside self could be a life-raft. They won't be scared of germs, of school, of every minor change in routine, if we don't tell them they should be.