Quote:
Originally Posted by meeera
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.
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Several issues here.
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.