cccc’s posterous

WOW! It's mind boggling and infinitely exciting, all that knowledge at our fingertips. Let's just hope the power never goes out.

Thanks Denise for your very nice comment... I just sent an email to all staff members at CCCC's college to talk & reflect about what you said...

I have strong feelings about this. I'm basically a fan of the Internet: I use it all the time, and love the way it democratizes access to information. At the same time, reading isn't just about information, and I don't think reading a screen is the same sort of experience as reading a book. If you read something onscreen, you tend to mine it. If you read something in a book, you tend to enter it. Mining is the way you extract things you wish to put to practical use. Entering is the way you let another person's voice into your core. A piece of literature is not just a compendium of information: it is a verbal artistic experience. And if you throw away books, you are telling kids that verbal artistic experiences don't matter very much. They're already hearing that enough without our reinforcing it.

What are those T.S. Eliot lines?

"Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?"

What Cushing Academy has done seems to me an act of Philistinism. It is a way of saying that we don't believe in wisdom, and don't believe in knowledge, that all we believe in is information. Presumably because it's easier to cash in on.

I hope school administrators will also consider the Library "as place" before they close their doors, as they plan to do at Cushing Academy. There is no other place at a school or college quite like the library. I am sometimes stunned by the diversity of people that come to our library. A library is a level playing field where they feel safe and comfortable as they seek to educate themselves. No other building on a school or college campus offers what the Library offers: libraries are portals to everything real and imagined, whether in the form of books, audiovisual materials, manuscripts and original documents, images, scholarly communications, newspapers, and in addition, libraries have computers that offer much of the same (and more) in the digital realm. Libraries are also where you'll find helpful people who will support your search for information, quiet spaces where you can "enter" those worlds David Frankel described. Libraries are a place to be alone or to study with new friends and colleagues. I remind students that educated people support libraries in their communities. There is very little left in this country that is free and I hope libraries will continue to exist along with playgrounds.