I have a love affair with libraries. Growing up in a small New Hampshire town, our library was more artifact than lending institution, but I liked it anyway. It shared the property line with my school, so our classes visited the library every week and checked out books from Peggy Ward, the librarian who had a British accent, which, of course, increased my artifact-impression of the place.
In eighth grade, our long-term substitute teacher must have misread the class requirements because she assigned us 10-page papers on a local history topic—a challenge for high school students—and we had to use holdings that were locked away in the library’s basement. That basement was everything you’d imagine of a 100-year-old New England library’s basement—dark and a bit damp, with a chained-off area. By now my imagination has augmented the scene so much I picture an arched doorway and iron gate, but I’m probably making that up.
There was also a small college in our town, and my friends and I often studied in its library, using their more substantial collection for our research papers and taking advantage of early versions of InfoTrac. (That was where I learned to use microfilm.) I felt particularly scholarly in a study room or at a private desk by a third-floor window.
I can’t say I checked out many books from those libraries—my parents bought me a lot of books, and I was awfully busy chasing balls around playing fields—but there, and everywhere I have lived since, I have benefited from libraries. In Glen Ellyn, Illinois, the library was beautiful and within walking distance of my one-bedroom apartment—I’d hang out with the homeless guys, reading in the sunshine of a well-lit reading room. In Wheaton, Illinois, the library even lent paintings, which greatly enhanced the apartment my friends and I lived in. The library in Petersburg, Alaska, was too small to have a sitting area, but the librarians had assembled a great collection on local topics. It was there I discovered one of my all-time favorite books, Jonathan Raban’s Passage to Juneau.
I could have easily forgone these library experiences, and I’m sure most of my fellow residents never used the library. But that’s okay; to my mind these libraries were each community’s jewel, both for the services they offered and the manner in which they offered them.
Allow me to contrast my library experience with my experience of school—an experience colored particularly by my time as a teacher. Too frequently in our system I recognize what Ivan Illich describes persuasively (and frighteningly) in his book, Deschooling Society. School, to Illich’s view, is a manipulative institution, which tends “to be highly complex and costly” and “in which much of the elaboration and expense is concerned with convincing consumers that they cannot live without the product or the treatment offered by the institution.”
If this does not describe school, what does? My school employs counselors, and while one of their duties is to watch over students’ emotional well-being, their primary duty is to convince students to make good choices—e.g. staying in school and working hard there. Similarly, we teachers must be primarily concerned with graduation rates and attendance—and we are instructed to build relationships with students so that students will want to stay in school. To assist in this effort, we parade data before students to show how much more money a high school graduate makes than a dropout and how much more a college graduate makes than a high school graduate. (The college-wage premium, a stat measuring the difference in wages between high school and college-educated workers, is currently 49.5%.) We teachers are taught to share “learning targets” with our students before each lesson, which show students in “student-speak” how what we are doing will benefit them—that is, why they “cannot live without the product.” And, by natural fall out, each teacher has become an expert in explaining and defending the relevance of their curriculum, which suggests we engage in apologetics almost as frequently as instruction.
These are only the most obvious strategies to convince students to stay in school. Less obvious are the entertainment incentives built into schooling culture: sports, clubs, facilities. Too frequently I hear colleagues declare that activities like sports are the only reason many students come to school. Should this not alarm us more than it does? Amanda Ripley’s “The Case Against High School Sports” examines how little this fact raises our ire. Instead, the argument is presented as a simple justification for maintaining those activities’ budgets, budgets that grow at each level of school. Says Illich, “Expenditures to motivate the student to stay on in school skyrocket as he climbs the pyramid. On higher levels they are disguised as new football stadiums, chapels, or programs called International Education.” It makes me uncomfortable to consider my own undergraduate alma mater, which built a sports complex, science building, and student center in the decade after I graduated.
Counter to the manipulative institution, Illich describes a “convivial” institution, which is marked by “spontaneous use.” People use these kinds of institutions “without having to be institutionally convinced that it is to their advantage to do so.” His examples include things we would not normally even consider institutions: sidewalks, telephone link-ups, sewage systems, drinking water, parks. His last example, parks, brought to my mind that great institution I began this article praising: the public library.
I’m not sure where Illich would place the public library on his spectrum of institutions. Perhaps he would look at my own library’s advertising budget and website and declare it impurely convivial, but it is so far removed from the compulsory nature of school that I cannot place it anywhere near the manipulative side. To my mind, the library is the archetypal alternative to a high-cost education (the high cost education being one whose value, aptly described by Illich, is usually “a function of the number of years [the student] has completed and the costliness of the schools [that student] has attended”). I find the archetype most simply and memorably expressed in Matt Damon’s film Good Will Hunting, when Will argues with a snobby Harvard student in a bar and rebukes him by insulting his overpriced schooling: “The sad thing about a guy like you is, in 50 years you’re gonna start doin’ some thinkin’ on your own, and you’re going to come up with the fact that . . . you dropped 150 grand on [an] . . . education you could have got for a dollar fifty in late charges at the public library.”
Such a line, while playing upon popular perceptions of privileged classes, should haunt public educators. Schooling is costly, but creating access to knowledge is not. In my city of about 80,000 people, our library accounts for five percent of the city’s annual budget. For five percent of the general fund, community members acquire a place to meet and study, access the internet, and find books containing any information or cultural expression they desire. (The collection currently holds around 153,000 volumes, but between inter-library loan and the library’s willingness to purchase books its patrons request, the collection is clearly unlimited.) The very mission of the library reveals its desire not to compel community members, but to assist them in the pursuits they choose: “anticipate needs, build relationships and communities, and connect community to a global world.”
The school district, by comparison, demands taxpayers fund a budget 74 times larger than the library’s. Its general fund alone requires 32 times the library’s entire budget. Surely such comparisons are unfair if we read from them that the school district is spending money unwisely and the library is a picture of fiscal restraint, but that is not my point. Nor do I imply that we should abolish schools and simply maintain a library. Instead, I observe that the cultural model of a library, a knowledge service, is a cheaper and more efficient educational endeavor than a school.
I’m a biased observer, to be sure. In fact, I am as biased an observer as one can be, particularly as the nature of my relationship with the library has changed from my early years. Of the 35 books I read in a recent year (a number that includes seven audiobooks), 29 were borrowed from the library. My wife and I home-school our children, a pursuit that allows us to choose a topic—say, the Civil War—and then raid the library’s collection. At any given time, my wife is likely to have upwards of 70 books checked out. How many public-school children can dive into a pile of 35 books on the Civil War when they study it in school? One of my kids’ favorites is a series called, You Wouldn’t Want to Be… The titles cover the Civil War, World War II, Medieval Europe and more. They’re not books we’d buy, but for a one-time read, among a number of other books on the same topic, they’re wonderful.
On the institutional side, children in school are usually restricted to a textbook’s retelling of events, which is often little better than reading a dictionary. Is that the teacher’s fault? Absolutely not. Her school’s budget (if she were teaching in my neighborhood) is already 89% of the library’s budget—how can she possibly ask for more for her 23 students? The school, existing in the system we have created, is responsible for much, much more than supplying learning tools to students, and that’s part of the inefficiency in the system and part of the complexity Illich describes.
The library has great potential for how we might reconsider education in our communities. Who is to say I could not conduct a class on writing, offered to the general public, conducted in the library’s meeting room? The class could target not students compelled to sit and listen to me, regardless of interest or motivation, but anyone interested in writing better, young or old.
I do not for a second believe we could banish our schools and simply lean on the library to provide education, but I do like to envision alternatives for educating students, and I see no reason why the library couldn’t become the center around which education could rotate. Take a little pipe dream I developed out of a few of Illich’s other ideas (ideas I’ll refrain from summarizing here), where public high schools as we know them cease to exist and instead a dozen students are assigned to a secondary tutor. If I were that tutor, I could take students to the library and help them coordinate their own course of study, choosing books and readings for each individual and meeting each student’s goals. Institutionally, even as it now exists, the library would fill the student’s and tutor’s needs. The school system, on the other hand, cannot stand for the plan I have just mentioned. Most of what a student studies must be, of necessity, precisely what every other student is studying. Its curricular insistence and institutional inflexibility point to what Illich describes as a manipulative institution.
And while my plan will never be enacted, juxtaposing the library and the school system strikes me as a worthwhile exercise, since the primary mission of both is education, but each pursues that mission in a wholly different manner. The beauty of the library, for me, has always been what it offers and the cost at which it offers it. It offers access to knowledge, space for reflection and discourse, and it costs the community a relative pittance. (It’s worth noting that this doesn’t even consider how well the library serves the poor and homeless members of its community.)
Where do these reflections lead? In one sense, nowhere in particular—few folks are interested in restructuring the entire school system. But why not envision a better way of learning and, where possible, seize the opportunities available to improve the quality of our lives? Such is a small part of why my wife and I home-school our children: their education is better served by the convivial institution of the public library than the manipulative institution of the public school.