02-26-2013, 11:11 PM | #121 |
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Without libraries, this is just not true. There are a ton of preschoolers out there with minimal access to books at home. Preschoolers need multiple picture books read to them each day. In an income below the poverty line, even used books are just not affordable at the rate of reading that needs to take place for literacy development.
Then, schoolchildren. With no school libraries, what are they supposed to read? Photocopied comprehension sheets and nothing else? My kid's school actively does the Lexile programme (along with lots of other reading), and he's been borrowing three Lexile books a week from the school library. Where are these supposed to come from if not from there? And then, adults. Serious readers read up to 20-30 books per month. Secondhand books are around $2-8 dollars here (more for newer used books). How on earth could someone without money for anything other than rent, bills and food afford that? Even casual but consistent readers on a low income, at 2-4 books a month, would be looking at doing some serious cuts to the food budget. And I'd expect secondhand book prices to rise, and availability to contract, if libraries didn't exist. Our mileages vary a lot here. I'm wondering how exactly you expect schools to teach reading and adults to want to read if there weren't public lending libraries. |
02-26-2013, 11:16 PM | #122 | |
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02-26-2013, 11:36 PM | #123 | |
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They're also slowly adding newer functions like lending ebooks and digital audiobooks, but that's nowhere near taking over from paper books yet. When/if it does, great, whatever, so long as they continue to lend ereaders to people who can't afford them, offer paper books to those for whom that's more appropriate (eg children's board books), and so on. That's what a public library is: a way for we the people to buy books that we can all access, regardless of income. If anything, income inequality is rising, not falling, so I just can't see the obsolescence here. |
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02-26-2013, 11:43 PM | #124 | |
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I seem to recall that the movie studios initially hated the movie rental stores. However, they must have come to see them as being valuable sources of income. They started putting out ads for DVD releases urging people to buy or rent. |
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02-26-2013, 11:58 PM | #125 | |
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Do you think that the parents of these pre-schoolers are using the library? I doubt it. Lack of school libraries? Why is that? We spend tons of money on schools - but there's no money for libraries? Lexile program? I'd never heard of it - checked Wikipedia and it sounds like a nightmare. No wonder people homeschool. Serious readers who read 30 books a month? Let them fund it themselves. Anyone with that kind of habit should be willing to get a second job to support it. Why should we provide such people with libraries? Used bookstores? I have two within a block of me. One will die when its owner, who is around 70, dies. The other, likewise, but with a younger owner, unless he can adopt someone to run the "family farm". So I think you have that one right. How do I expect schools to teach reading? Phonics. How come that stopped working? Worked fine when I was a kid. Maria Montessori could teach retarded children to read - so what's the problem? http://www.montessoriworld.org/Readi.../overview.html Libraries are obsolete. I can tell you when that dawned on me - way back in the 90s. In 1991, the Chicago Public Library system built a huge, dysfunctional central library downtown. It was a Monument. I looked at it, and realized that the last stage of any human enterprise begins when it starts building monuments to itself. And it's been downhill for the Chicago library system since then. Funding cuts, layoffs, etc. Of course it will take years to finally die, for the usual featherbedding reasons, and because some good people are struggling to keep it going. The Detroit library, larger than Chicago's, is still around in a town that is disappearing out from under it. Twenty or thirty years from now, our children will look back at the public library in the same way we look at movie palaces of the 1920s. Beautiful, but largely irrelevant. |
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02-27-2013, 12:06 AM | #126 | |
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Your point about movies is interesting, but assuming that the author is the studio, libraries have to figure out how to be Netflix rather than Blockbuster. Or Amazon rather than Borders. Right now, maybe they are B&N. |
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02-27-2013, 12:16 AM | #127 | |
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People who are contemporaries live in different technological eras. I have friends who do not use computers. I have one son who rejects ebooks - but voraciously reads pbooks. So I expect public libraries to linger for a while, servicing such people. But unless the new functions you delineate become new core functions, their days are numbered. The historical core function of being a repository for books to be lent the public is doomed. |
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02-27-2013, 12:45 AM | #128 |
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I don't think that it's a matter of parent's not caring Harmon. More like it's a matter of not having the time because it takes two incomes coming in to keep food on the table and a roof over the families head. Government is supposed to be 'of the people, by the people and for the people' but it seems more and more like it's 'of the rich, by the rich and for the rich' instead. That mentality filters down in many different ways. I think that's why so many go for a TV rather than books too. It's a one time expense to buy the actual TV set and you get 100's of hrs of entertainment in return (or at least you used to) and books only have the one thing in them and pbooks don't come in a big package of several 100 for one low price. That's one way ebooks are better. You can find free or low priced ebooks all around. Anyway there is also stress in not knowing if you will have a roof over your head next month or not, or a filling dinner as well, which can inhibit being able to sit down long enough to read even if you have access to books. And what about all those private libraries that rich men used to put together and then not even cut the pages of a single book in order to read it? They had the $$ and presumably the time to read, but didn't. Meanwhile poor men (and women) did read and they went on to invent the tools that led to our modern world today.
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02-27-2013, 08:54 AM | #129 |
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I'm not sure how lack of money meant the students were not learning to read. My point earlier was that some students do not have access to books at home, only through school libraries and regular libraries, even though I did not say it. I never said they weren't learning to read.
I even said that only having cereal boxes and dictionaries to read would turn them off of reading, not foster a love of it. I'm not even going to address the changes in teaching reading, because that is too big of a subject. It changes in waves as research shows that this or that works better. For better or worse, schools keep trying their hardest to teach students to read, even if the students don't care if they do or not. |
02-27-2013, 12:20 PM | #130 |
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02-27-2013, 08:52 PM | #131 |
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True. Maybe that's why there are so many of us misanthropes raging against a vicious and viscous world.
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02-28-2013, 03:58 AM | #132 | ||
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Last edited by Rizla; 02-28-2013 at 04:02 AM. |
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02-28-2013, 05:01 AM | #133 |
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Well it's wasn't insufficiency of reading material that let them die. Point for Harry then.
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02-28-2013, 06:58 AM | #134 | |
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Read "The Read Aloud Handbook" by Jim Trelease and open your eyes. Libraries are a vital source for the next generation. I checked out over $10,000 worth of books last year at my library. It would take a very wealthy individual to be able to buy that many books, and to not feel the need to restrict their children's purchases due to budget concerns. Libraries are the one place I can happily tell my children, "You can have anything here you want." |
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02-28-2013, 10:39 AM | #135 | |||
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But then, schools don't exist to educate kids. That's secondary to providing jobs for administrators and teachers, handing out contracts to suppliers, and establishing political fiefdoms. There are some signs of hope, though. My niece is a teacher in a school system out west, where every teacher in her school had to reapply for their job. Guess what - only 25% (including my niece) were rehired. And when she wanted books for her students, she reached out to friends & family and we bought her the books. She didn't just sit around passively blaming the lack of libraries for her problems. Which is probably why the school had the sense to rehire her. |
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