How to rip the heart out of a school
About a year ago, I wrote How to destroy a library, a very cynical take on Andy Burnham’s plans to turn libraries into vaguely book-themed amusement parks for idiots, and ruin the concentration of anyone trying to read a damn book. Well, the other day I went into my local library - about 60% of the people in there were using the Internet. There was some group therapy session going on. Kids running around. A man taking a mobile call. And about three people - myself included - trying hard to read a book.
Today, I see this article in The Boston Globe: Welcome to the library. Say goodbye to the books. Cushing Academy in Ashburnham, Massachusetts, have decided that the best way to improve the school library is to remove the books from it. Yeah, the whole lot. Books says the headmaster are an outdated technology
. Andy Burnham’s desire to turn all libraries into coffee shops may be one step closer. What’s the point of even having a library without any books? I may be rather biased, as I have four library cards in my wallet and spend considerable amounts of time inside a building with easy access to two million books. Thinking that digital technology replaces books is a bit like thinking that pop music replaces classical music or digital photography replaces film. No way.
I used to be pretty lax about all this stuff. But the more I see people doing utterly stupid shit like having libraries with no books in them, the more firmly I find myself attached to dead tree. It’s cheap. Doesn’t require electricity. It has a clear set of permissions. The pagination/citation system is extremely well understood. You don’t have problems with which versions are canonical. It’s pretty hard to censor or remove from distribution. Once a book is on the shelf in libraries, bookshops and homes, it’s very hard to take that back.
And I get more convinced that technology need not play as big a role as it does in schools. Yes, obviously, kids should learn how to use computers. They are doing a shit job of teaching that at the moment, but that’s another matter altogether. But plenty of people seem to think that kids sitting in front of computers all day is really the best thing we can do when it comes to the future of education. I guess it’s getting them prepared for the future. The really awesome things about computers: the creativity they enable, the freedom that being able to programme them unlocks - schools don’t teach any of that. No, they feed you moronic ‘learning objects’ - no creativity, no thinking, just blobs of standardized learning units drip-fed down the wire into your terminal. Fuck that. When I think of my favourite teacher at the school level, I think of a few important properties: firstly, said teacher was extremely intelligent and well-educated, and secondly, he had very little time for the syllabus of the examination board. He stuck to it broadly, but was more than happy to go off-topic if it was going to help us know more about the subject. This probably didn’t do much for our grades - but that doesn’t matter. I’ve seen some good evidence that A-level grades aren’t very predictive of success in higher education (Kevin Sear’s paper in ‘Higher Education’ 1983 showed only weak correlation - and there seems pretty good evidence that the weak correlation found in the early 1980s has only gotten weaker over the years - I think the environment of university vs. school plays a really big role in success rate - plenty of those people who do really well at school end up sucking at university because they haven’t got mum and dad prompting them to do their homework - and plenty of those people who did fairly averagely at school end up flourishing at university for exactly the same reason).
If your idea of education is taking books away from kids and replacing them with kids spending numerous hours per day staring at a screen, you should have absolutely nothing to do with the education of children. Computers are a tool, not a panacea. If your institution sucks, it’ll still suck if you add more computers.
Malet Street, London, WC1E 6
