Money Changes Everything

Worse yet, unabashed worship of the dollar fails to send the message to young people that there's value in developing their minds beyond what's needed to work at some Internet start-up. There's little I sense today that would nudge a young adult to develop a healthy intellectual curiosity--the kind that drives someone to plow through all the works of a particular author or become wrapped up in learning about the coelacanth, an ugly deep-sea fish believed, until recently, to have been extinct. The kind of curiosity I'm referring to--undirected, digressive, passionate--must have three things: the freedom to explore, with no agenda other than a desire to entertain one's intellect; support from one's immediate crowd (or at least, benign neglect); and a well-stocked library that offers access to the Web. It's undisciplined, time-consuming, self-indulgent, and appears, from the viewpoint of certain parents, unproductive. A colleague of mine recently told me that a co-worker's son, a freshman in college, is studying the oboe and taking courses in film studies and Russian political history. The young man's father, a businessman, is convinced his son is screwing around.

I'm not alone in noticing a slip in support for the egghead in us all. New York City Interim Schools Chancellor Harold O. Levy has taken to stuffing the mailboxes of the members of the city's board of education with poems by Wallace Stevens and articles from Scientific American and the New York Review of Books. Despite the intense pressure on schools themselves to act more like businesses, Levy's goal for the group is to focus "less on administrative minutiae" and instead add "intellectual rigor to the often tedious board meetings," according to the New York Times. Bravo! I hope that he extends his philosophy to the students, especially in this time of kneeling at the altar of the standarized test score.

If we neglect helping young people develop and feed an intellectual curiosity, we're selling them short. The need that infants have for mental stimulation has been well publicized in the last few years, but there also appears to be evidence that puberty is ripe for brain development. The cover story in Newsweek's May 8, 2000, issue reports that around puberty "the brain blossoms with new brain cells and neural connections, something that was thought to happen only in the first 18 months of life."

In the next few weeks, young people will pour out of school, in charge of their own brain cells for a few months--at least once the novelty of the beach has worn off. What falls to us, then, is the urgent task of creating an environment that feeds the brain and the soul in a profit-driven world. To create rich collections, you can rely on SLJ's reviews to lead you to the best materials. But you'll also need to sense and cultivate nascent interests in the young adults who use your library, whether it's the literature of the Lost Generation, NASA, or even the ocarina, a recent fascination, a friend tells me, of a student in his library. To free up time to do this, read about managing your workload in "Quit Playing Catch-Up".

I don't begrudge anyone a fat paycheck, but our country will become a grim place if dreaming up ways to sell goods on the Web becomes our sole preoccupation in life. In the 16th century, Martin Luther also apparently felt that society could overvalue wealth, for he wrote, with my modest addition in brackets, "We can get along without burgomasters, princes, and noblemen, but we can't do without schools [and libraries], for they must rule the world."