Stupid White Men-- and Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation! - Michael Moore [46]
Almost 10 percent of U.S. public schools have enrollments that are more than 25 percent greater than the capacity of their permanent buildings. Classes have to be held in the hallways, outdoors, in the gym, in the cafeteria; one school I visited even held classes in a janitor’s closet. It’s not as if the janitor’s closets are being used for anything related to cleaning, anyway—in New York City almost 15 percent of the eleven hundred public schools are without full-time custodians, forcing teachers to mop their own floors and students to do without toilet paper. We already send our kids out into the street to hawk candy bars so their schools can buy band instruments—what’s next? Car washes to raise money for toilet paper?
Further proof of just how special our little offspring are is the number of public and even school libraries that have been shut down or had their hours cut back. The last thing we need is a bunch of kids hanging out around a bunch of books!
Apparently “President” Bush agrees: in his first budget he proposed cutting federal spending on libraries by $39 million, down to $168 million—a nearly 19 percent reduction. Just the week before, his wife, former school librarian Laura Bush, kicked off a national campaign for America’s libraries, calling them “community treasure chests, loaded with a wealth of information available to everyone, equally.” The President’s mother, Barbara Bush, heads the Foundation for Family Literacy. Well, there’s nothing like having firsthand experience with illiteracy in the family to motivate one into acts of charity.
For kids who are exposed to books at home, the loss of a library is sad. But for kids who come from environments where people don’t read, the loss of a library is a tragedy that might keep them from ever discovering the joys of reading—or from gathering the kind of information that will decide their lot in life. Jonathan Kozol, for decades an advocate for disadvantaged children, has observed that school libraries “remain the clearest window to a world of noncommercial satisfactions and enticements that most children in poor neighborhoods will ever know.”
Kids deprived of access to good libraries are also being kept from developing the information skills they need to keep up in workplaces that are increasingly dependent on rapidly changing information. The ability to conduct research is “probably the most essential skill [today’s students] can have,” says Julie Walker, executive director of the American Association of School Librarians. “The knowledge [students] acquire in school is not going to serve them throughout their lifetimes. Many of them will have four to five careers in a lifetime. It will be their ability to navigate information that will matter.”
Who’s to blame for the decline in libraries? Well, when it comes to school libraries, you can start by pointing the finger (Yes, that finger) at Richard Nixon. From the 1960s until 1974, school libraries received specific funding from the government. But in 1974the Nixon administration changed the rules, stipulating that federal education money be doled out in “block grants” to be spent by states however they chose. Few states chose to spend the money on libraries, and the downslide began. This is one reason that materials in many school libraries today date from the 1960s and early 1970s, before funding was diverted. (“No, Sally, the Soviet Union isn’t our enemy. The Soviet Union has been kaput for ten years....”)
This 1999 account by an Education Week reporter about the “library” at a Philadelphia elementary school could apply to any number of similarly neglected schools:
Even the best books in the library at T. M. Pierce Elementary School are dated, tattered, and discolored. The worst—many