Author Alan Gibbons: ‘A Library Without a Librarian Is Just a Room’
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By Lauren Barack -- School Library Journal, 10/7/2009 2:00:00 PM
U.K. author Alan Gibbons is taking his fight for school libraries on the road.
After launching a petition to Prime Minister Gordon Brown to make libraries mandatory in U.K. schools, the children’s book author knows he still needs to expand the message of his pro-library group, Campaign for the Book.
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Alan Gibbons |
With just over 4,500 signatures, and a looming deadline of December 11 to submit those signatures, Gibbons has plans for a reading and writing road show, along with a conference to mirror the one held in July to get more digital ink to his cause.
“The Government’s line is that money for literacy is given to schools to spend as they wish,” he says by e-mail. “I think this is misguided. The Government gives clear guidance on many issues so why not the most fundamental of all, the right to read?”
Gibbons started his petition after hearing news that the Meadows Community School, for 11- to 16-year-olds in Chesterfield, England, had shuttered its library and let its librarian go as well. And from there, other stories of cutbacks made their way to the writer’s ears. It’s a story educators in the United States know too well, as the recession has trimmed education budgets from state to state, forcing some schools to cut back on media specialists.
Like the U.K., the U.S. lacks a national standard for media specialists but the American Association of School Librarians (AASL) has spent the past few years trying to make that a requirement, and believes eventually, it will, says Ann Martin, AASL’s immediate past president and an educational specialist for Library Information Services at Henrico County School in Virginia.
“Students can learn content, but they need to know how to apply that content to real world situations,” says Martin. “Schools can’t afford to be without school libraries. Even if the dollar sign looks appealing, they’ll pay with academic achievement.”
Gibbons too understands that given the economic climate, it may not feel like the best time to push politicians to loosen purse strings—or dictate to schools how to spend pinched budgets. But to most educators, the funds for a school library or librarian should fall in the same category as chairs, tables, pencils and paper—all of which are essential to basic education.
“I agree with the Unesco [United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization] verdict that reading for pleasure is the key determinant of academic success,” says Gibbons. “More importantly, it is one of those civilizing influences that quite simply makes us better people.”
In that context, Gibbons says it’s only logical that there should be a guaranteed facility where reading for pleasure, research and information is made available under the supervision of a “respected, high status professional.”
“That means not just statutory libraries but librarians too,” he adds. “A library without a librarian is a room!”
