Why Both School and Public Libraries?
From a lay point of view, questioning why we have both school and public libraries seems very reasonable and utterly logical. From the professional point of view, such questions, guaranteed, prove provocative if not exasperating. What if we ask, instead, what is the best way to give library service in a community? What do we want our libraries to achieve?
The facts in the matter are that there are many more schools, whether districts or buildings, than there are public library administrative units or buildings. And there are far more libraries than school and public ones. All libraries, except private ones, are the creations of publics, and as such they reflect what their parent publics want and need in terms of library services.
Of course, the realities are that libraries are only possible in ways and to the extents that their publics are willing to afford them. Large corporations spend millions of dollars on their libraries but always with the view that these expenditures are profitable. Yet corporate librarians will tell you, whether they are in a museum, a hospital, a government agency or a manufacturing conglomerate, that they always have to defend the value of and return from what they do. The value of information in the abstract is almost impossible to defend, and a research firm would much rather have one more chemist than another librarian when toting up the bottom line. And priority of interest prevails: the same community of 1100 people which may support five different churches cannot afford a single library.
Until we can offer people compelling research-based reasons for why a certain kind of library service is to a public’s advantage, we have to pursue a heavily value-laden path. That's what makes so difficult convincing people that a library designated to a specific mission can be most effective and efficient, that is - economic. To outsiders, libraries look alike – they all get Time Magazine; they all have dictionaries, encyclopedias and catalog access to their collections. What is the necessity, the public wants to know, of a library devoted to high schoolers and two blocks away one for the public? After all, when kids are out of school they go to the public library. Agreed. Some do, but many do not.
One area in pursuing information on which we do have considerable research from the 1930s onwards is on the high value of given the convenience factor and the detrimental cost of one's own labor as a barrier. This research harmonizes most obviously with individual observation and professional experience. My own testimony is that I once participated in an ad hoc faculty group on learning at a state university where, much to my surprise, I observed other faculty regularly exchange knowledge and publications among themselves to the exclusion of library use. All this sharing took place despite that their offices were built in wrap-around wings on two sides of the library, not more than 50 to 100 steps away for most of them. Convenience, or the perception of it, is the primary criteria by which most people choose the information they use; it has more impact than accuracy, currency, relevance or any other evaluative criteria. Thus, the closer you can bring information to its intended users, the easier you can make it, and the more help you can give directly to users, the more likely you will succeed in achieving satisfactory information use. More agony goes into the most apt sighting of a public library than any other building consideration; the strongest virtue of school library media services consists of placing them in the midst of the students.
Of course, I don't expect many people to believe this fundamental piece of library research. Most will not admit to the convenience principle, however well documented it is. Typically both users of libraries and non-users will tout how actively they pursue information in making decisions regardless of all the surveys that show library use somewhere between .5 and 1-3% out of the total of all information sources sought by the public. Co-workers and family members rank highest among sources because, need we say, they are close, readily available and trusted by information seekers – that is, convenient!
The most important reason for specific libraries dedicated to their users is just that: special treatment and specialized expertise devoted to and focused on the intended users. And of all the elements in library service, the essential one is staff. Nothing can substitute for a school library media professional, educated to quality service and giving that service on a par that is integrated with the best of other faculty.
This is not to say that in no case should a school and public or any other combination of libraries be combined. The point in sharing of services is that they reflect the needs of the whole community to be served, that they be planned to handle the number of issues that arise in jointly operated services, and that the issues be addressed and settled or answered in advance of a decision to co-locate. Problematic issues include questions of funding, governance, and staffing among other service questions; combined libraries fail most frequently over these issues when they are not resolved in advance.
Libraries, after all, stem from sharing with one another; otherwise we would each have our own stuff. We need to approach all questions of library service within terms of sharing, both among our users and with other libraries and other non-library sources.
A final word of advice: approach issues of joint libraries calmly as an idea to be explored. In providing library services, we have always to look at what is to be achieved, who is to be served, how they are to be included in the decision process, and what the evaluation will be. Joint library planning takes steps that represent the community of interest, that communicate between all affected parties and with the public. Potential partners have to examine what they can contribute to the whole and how they will continue to pay their share in order to accomplish the greatest total of which they are able.
The experience in Minnesota is that since 1990 when the law was changed to allow for joint school and public libraries, only one--already pre-existent--organized under these provisions. After almost ten years, only one other followed, and in that case a tornado obliterated both school and public library so they had motivation to start from scratch. Many other communities addressed co-location and eventually decided to remain separate, most in very small towns where co-location is especially appealing. Still, however, the seemingly obvious logic of combining libraries goes on. It can't be turned aside without the interested parties pursuing for themselves the steps they need to take to make it work, and thereby learning a lot more about libraries, their nature and services.
Welcome them.
Roger Sween wrote this article as a “think-piece” while a library development consultant in the Minnesota state library agency. He has been in his career a school librarian, an academic librarian and professor of library science, a public librarian, a freelance information broker, and a constant user of libraries throughout his life. This version has been revised over the original.
____
© 2009 by Roger Sween.
I welcome substantive comments on the contents of this blog. Personal comments may be made to my email address, give above.
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
Sunday, February 1, 2009
US v. ALA
Libraries in the Rehnquist Decision
United States v. American Library Association 539 US 194 (2003)
*Note: The following presents collapsed statements from the Rehnquist decision upholding the Child Internet Protection Act (CIPA) and are given here without quotation marks or ellipses. Quotation marks and ellipses are used in the dissents. CIPA required all schools and public libraries that received certain federal assistance programs to install filters against pornography.
Rehnquist for the 6 to 3 plurality begins.
To determine whether libraries would violate the First Amendment by employing the filtering software that CIPA requires, we must first examine the role of libraries in our society.
Public libraries pursue the worthy missions of facilitating the learning and cultural enrichment. Libraries should provide books and other resources for the interest, information, and enlightenment of all people of the community the library serves.[1]
To fulfill their traditional missions, public libraries must have broad discretion to decide what material to provide to their patrons. Their goal has never been to provide universal coverage. To this end, libraries collect those materials deemed to have requisite and appropriate quality.[2]
The librarian’s responsibility … is to separate out the gold from the garbage, not to preserve everything.[3]
Public library staffs necessarily consider content in making collection decisions and enjoy broad discretion in making them.
Internet access in public libraries in neither a traditional nor a designated public forum.[4] Firstly, the Internet did not exist until quite recently, nor been held in trust for the purposes of assembly, communication of thoughts between citizens, and discussing public questions.[5] We have ‘rejected the view that traditional public forum status extends beyond its historic confines.’[6] Nor does Internet access in a public library satisfy our definition of a designated public forum. To create such a forum, the government must make an affirmative choice to open up is property for use as a public forum.
A public library does not acquire Internet terminals in order to create a public forum for Web publishers to express themselves, any more than it collects books in order to prove a public forum for the authors of books to speak. It provides Internet access, not to encourage a diversity of views from private speakers,[7] but for the same reasons it offers other library resources; to facilitate research, learning, and recreational pursuits by furnishing materials of requisite and appropriate quality. …As Congress recognized. the Internet is simply another method for making information available in a school or library.[8] It is no more than a technological extension of the book stack.[9]
Most libraries already exclude pornography from their print collections because they deem it inappropriate for inclusion. It would make little sense to treat libraries’ judgments to block online pornography any differently. Moreover, because of the vast quantity of material on the Internet and the rapid pace at which it changes, libraries cannot possibly segregate, item by item, all the Internet material that is appropriate from all that is not. Neither can it provide access to only those it chooses without excluding an enormous amount of valuable material. Given that tradeoff, it is entirely reasonable for public libraries to instead exclude certain categories of content.
Stevens dissenting
“Rather than allowing local decisionmakers to tailor their responses to local problems, [CIPA] operates as a blunt nationwide restraint on adult access to ‘an enormous amount of valuable information’ that libraries cannot possible review.[10] Most of that information is constitutionally protected speech. In my view, this restraint is unconstitutional.
“The unchallenged findings of fact made by the District Court reveal fundamental defects in the filtering software. …The effect of the overblocking is the functional equivalent of a host of individual decisions excluding hundreds of thousands of individual constitutionally protected messages from Internet terminals located in public libraries throughout the nation. …The District Court expressly found that a variety of alternatives less restrictive are available at the local level. …These findings are consistent with scholarly comment on the issue arguing that local decisions tailored to local circumstances are more appropriate than a mandate from Congress. The plurality does not reject any of these findings.”
Instead the plurality “relies on the Solicitor General’s assurance that the statute permits individual librarians to disable filtering mechanisms whenever a patron so requests. …Until a blocked site or group of sites is unblocked, a patron is unlikely to know what is being hidden and therefore whether there is any point in asking for the filter to be removed.”
Souter dissenting joined by Ginzburg
“I agree in the main with Justice Stevens. …I also agree with the library appellees on a further reason to hold the blocking rule invalid. …The rule mandates action by recipient libraries that would violate the First Amendment’s guarantee of fee speech if the libraries took that action entirely on their own. I respectfully dissent on this further ground.”
Prepared by Roger Sween.
I welcome substantive comments on the contents of this blog. Personal comments may be made to me at the email address given above.
[1] This is a quote from ALA’s Library Bill of Rights.
[2] William Katz, Collection Development (1980) 6.
[3] F. Drury, Book Selection (1930) xi.
[4] As defined in Cornelius v. NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, Inc. 473 U.S. 788, 802 (1985).
[5] International Society for Krishna Consciousness, Inc. v. Lee 505 U.S. 672, 679 (1992).
[6] Arkansas Ed. Television Comm’n v.Forbes, 523 U.S. 678.
[7] Rosenberger v. Rector and Visitors of University of Virginia 515 U.S. 834. (1995).
[8] United States Senate, Report No. 106-141 (1999) 7.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Ante, at 11.
United States v. American Library Association 539 US 194 (2003)
*Note: The following presents collapsed statements from the Rehnquist decision upholding the Child Internet Protection Act (CIPA) and are given here without quotation marks or ellipses. Quotation marks and ellipses are used in the dissents. CIPA required all schools and public libraries that received certain federal assistance programs to install filters against pornography.
Rehnquist for the 6 to 3 plurality begins.
To determine whether libraries would violate the First Amendment by employing the filtering software that CIPA requires, we must first examine the role of libraries in our society.
Public libraries pursue the worthy missions of facilitating the learning and cultural enrichment. Libraries should provide books and other resources for the interest, information, and enlightenment of all people of the community the library serves.[1]
To fulfill their traditional missions, public libraries must have broad discretion to decide what material to provide to their patrons. Their goal has never been to provide universal coverage. To this end, libraries collect those materials deemed to have requisite and appropriate quality.[2]
The librarian’s responsibility … is to separate out the gold from the garbage, not to preserve everything.[3]
Public library staffs necessarily consider content in making collection decisions and enjoy broad discretion in making them.
Internet access in public libraries in neither a traditional nor a designated public forum.[4] Firstly, the Internet did not exist until quite recently, nor been held in trust for the purposes of assembly, communication of thoughts between citizens, and discussing public questions.[5] We have ‘rejected the view that traditional public forum status extends beyond its historic confines.’[6] Nor does Internet access in a public library satisfy our definition of a designated public forum. To create such a forum, the government must make an affirmative choice to open up is property for use as a public forum.
A public library does not acquire Internet terminals in order to create a public forum for Web publishers to express themselves, any more than it collects books in order to prove a public forum for the authors of books to speak. It provides Internet access, not to encourage a diversity of views from private speakers,[7] but for the same reasons it offers other library resources; to facilitate research, learning, and recreational pursuits by furnishing materials of requisite and appropriate quality. …As Congress recognized. the Internet is simply another method for making information available in a school or library.[8] It is no more than a technological extension of the book stack.[9]
Most libraries already exclude pornography from their print collections because they deem it inappropriate for inclusion. It would make little sense to treat libraries’ judgments to block online pornography any differently. Moreover, because of the vast quantity of material on the Internet and the rapid pace at which it changes, libraries cannot possibly segregate, item by item, all the Internet material that is appropriate from all that is not. Neither can it provide access to only those it chooses without excluding an enormous amount of valuable material. Given that tradeoff, it is entirely reasonable for public libraries to instead exclude certain categories of content.
Stevens dissenting
“Rather than allowing local decisionmakers to tailor their responses to local problems, [CIPA] operates as a blunt nationwide restraint on adult access to ‘an enormous amount of valuable information’ that libraries cannot possible review.[10] Most of that information is constitutionally protected speech. In my view, this restraint is unconstitutional.
“The unchallenged findings of fact made by the District Court reveal fundamental defects in the filtering software. …The effect of the overblocking is the functional equivalent of a host of individual decisions excluding hundreds of thousands of individual constitutionally protected messages from Internet terminals located in public libraries throughout the nation. …The District Court expressly found that a variety of alternatives less restrictive are available at the local level. …These findings are consistent with scholarly comment on the issue arguing that local decisions tailored to local circumstances are more appropriate than a mandate from Congress. The plurality does not reject any of these findings.”
Instead the plurality “relies on the Solicitor General’s assurance that the statute permits individual librarians to disable filtering mechanisms whenever a patron so requests. …Until a blocked site or group of sites is unblocked, a patron is unlikely to know what is being hidden and therefore whether there is any point in asking for the filter to be removed.”
Souter dissenting joined by Ginzburg
“I agree in the main with Justice Stevens. …I also agree with the library appellees on a further reason to hold the blocking rule invalid. …The rule mandates action by recipient libraries that would violate the First Amendment’s guarantee of fee speech if the libraries took that action entirely on their own. I respectfully dissent on this further ground.”
Prepared by Roger Sween.
I welcome substantive comments on the contents of this blog. Personal comments may be made to me at the email address given above.
[1] This is a quote from ALA’s Library Bill of Rights.
[2] William Katz, Collection Development (1980) 6.
[3] F. Drury, Book Selection (1930) xi.
[4] As defined in Cornelius v. NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, Inc. 473 U.S. 788, 802 (1985).
[5] International Society for Krishna Consciousness, Inc. v. Lee 505 U.S. 672, 679 (1992).
[6] Arkansas Ed. Television Comm’n v.Forbes, 523 U.S. 678.
[7] Rosenberger v. Rector and Visitors of University of Virginia 515 U.S. 834. (1995).
[8] United States Senate, Report No. 106-141 (1999) 7.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Ante, at 11.
Saturday, January 31, 2009
Science
The High Cost of Science (and everything else)
Some say the evidence for global warming is clear; others say the issue is a hoax. Either way public policy lies in the balance. As with other differences, experts and politicians disagree. While most of us hanker for certainty and clear direction, ready answers elude us. The real issue is do we want to pay the price of making up our own minds?
We can choose to learn nothing, do nothing. What is the worst that can happen? Let some one else decide. Is not that why they are the leaders so they have the burden of decisions and we followers can go about our business?
But if they are the leaders, they are so by our forbearance or election. In a democracy at the root, we decide. We decide based upon either interests or information. If decision is to be on the basis of interest alone, representative government implies that we know our own interests in an informed way and have made some effort to determine how acknowledged interests are best represented. Either way, we need some kind of answers, at least to the questions we ask ourselves.
Do I know where to look for answers? It is very popular to blame school age students for their lack of knowledge on science, geography, history and other subjects. However, recent surveys by the National Science Foundation and other agencies indicate that the adult-out-of-school population suffers the same deficiencies. Fewer than half of American adults understand that the Earth orbits the sun yearly; only 9% know what a molecule is; 25 million Americans cannot locate the United States on an unlabeled world map.
These questions are not difficult and are easily answered by most commonly available almanacs, encyclopedia yearbooks, dictionaries, or online sources. Because ignorance is not so terrible to admit, you can go to a library and ask any question in the strictest confidence. All it takes is a little curiosity, energized by frequently asking, “Do I know what this means?” and then not suppressing the question without followup.
When looking at the evidence do I know how to judge it? Commonly we weigh accuracy by whether the information given squares with what we already know. When we do not know enough either we have to learn more which is always a good thing, or we have to gauge the trustworthiness of the source that informed us. But when we think over where we go for the information we trust, it is typically to those convenient to us – family, friends, co-workers, and likely the Internet. Major studies of information seeking behavior for 75 years have consistently shown the same thing: in matters of information (that which we otherwise do not know), convenience trumps all other criteria for evaluating the worth of the information. Most of us are not ready to test the information in front of us by seeking more than one source, particularly sources with differing perspectives and different kinds of authority. To do so likely leads us from just two to three sources or more.
When I must judge conflicting information what is the method? Accuracy is more than counting noses. The skills required depend upon our abilities to spot accuracy due to multiple factors – currency, the credibility of the source, internal consistency with the known facts, objectivity in reporting, and the bringing together of mutual supporting sources. Also consider why contrary information fails to explain a problem or hold up to testing. Majority information is likely informative, but the razor that information has to pass over is the ability to make sense by itself without reference to any extraneous outside idea.
Why does method require the absence of ideology? If something is true, it is necessary apart from anyone wishing it true. Recent articles in The New Scientist and other professional journals suggest that science suffers a bad rap because it so often uncovers bad news. Viruses are developing ahead of our ability to control them; the melting arctic endangers polar bears; the magnetic pole could shift in such a way that the solar wind would strip off our atmosphere. The most difficult matter in science as in any human endeavor is to probe the falsifiability of an idea or theory; we are so eager for our proofs that we do not look for the one example where the subject in question fails the test.
Are we to seek simplicity or distrust it? The answer is yes. In science or any knowledge, we are to use our best tools, whether intellect or instruments, and seek the most elegant and necessary of answers. Frank Herbert in his novel Dune (1965) has one of his minor characters say, “The highest function of ecology is understanding consequences.” Likely true, but we are none of us in possession of the truth. The International Journal of Science Education reported in 2006 that when three sets of adults were exposed to differing presentations on science, each group wound up with more positive views towards science, irrespective of their own choice, but a less scientific one, that science is infallible. After all our efforts, science is only the best knowledge we have at this point. The adversaries to policy corrections on global warming know this and note that we have been wrong about science before – that the sun revolves around the earth, for instance – so we can be wrong now.
What do we do when uncertainty remains? We keep on searching. Real learning is constant. We watch the most relevant, balanced and pertinent programs, follow the hard news first, visit the library and consult the sources that do not come into our own home. We visit museums and take in lectures. We examine what we know and do not know. We have discussions that exchange real information.
Debates over science and the appropriate policy actions will continue as long as the U.S. is a democracy that wants to stay in the forefront of creativity, knowledge, and liberty. As citizens we can do our part, as best we can. For democracy, no one has found a substitute for vigilance.
____
Roger Sween specializes in the art of questions and their answers and therefore in the science of information-seeking behavior.
© 2009 by Roger Sween.
I welcome substantive comments on the contents of this blog. Personal comments to me may be sent to the email address given above.
Some say the evidence for global warming is clear; others say the issue is a hoax. Either way public policy lies in the balance. As with other differences, experts and politicians disagree. While most of us hanker for certainty and clear direction, ready answers elude us. The real issue is do we want to pay the price of making up our own minds?
We can choose to learn nothing, do nothing. What is the worst that can happen? Let some one else decide. Is not that why they are the leaders so they have the burden of decisions and we followers can go about our business?
But if they are the leaders, they are so by our forbearance or election. In a democracy at the root, we decide. We decide based upon either interests or information. If decision is to be on the basis of interest alone, representative government implies that we know our own interests in an informed way and have made some effort to determine how acknowledged interests are best represented. Either way, we need some kind of answers, at least to the questions we ask ourselves.
Do I know where to look for answers? It is very popular to blame school age students for their lack of knowledge on science, geography, history and other subjects. However, recent surveys by the National Science Foundation and other agencies indicate that the adult-out-of-school population suffers the same deficiencies. Fewer than half of American adults understand that the Earth orbits the sun yearly; only 9% know what a molecule is; 25 million Americans cannot locate the United States on an unlabeled world map.
These questions are not difficult and are easily answered by most commonly available almanacs, encyclopedia yearbooks, dictionaries, or online sources. Because ignorance is not so terrible to admit, you can go to a library and ask any question in the strictest confidence. All it takes is a little curiosity, energized by frequently asking, “Do I know what this means?” and then not suppressing the question without followup.
When looking at the evidence do I know how to judge it? Commonly we weigh accuracy by whether the information given squares with what we already know. When we do not know enough either we have to learn more which is always a good thing, or we have to gauge the trustworthiness of the source that informed us. But when we think over where we go for the information we trust, it is typically to those convenient to us – family, friends, co-workers, and likely the Internet. Major studies of information seeking behavior for 75 years have consistently shown the same thing: in matters of information (that which we otherwise do not know), convenience trumps all other criteria for evaluating the worth of the information. Most of us are not ready to test the information in front of us by seeking more than one source, particularly sources with differing perspectives and different kinds of authority. To do so likely leads us from just two to three sources or more.
When I must judge conflicting information what is the method? Accuracy is more than counting noses. The skills required depend upon our abilities to spot accuracy due to multiple factors – currency, the credibility of the source, internal consistency with the known facts, objectivity in reporting, and the bringing together of mutual supporting sources. Also consider why contrary information fails to explain a problem or hold up to testing. Majority information is likely informative, but the razor that information has to pass over is the ability to make sense by itself without reference to any extraneous outside idea.
Why does method require the absence of ideology? If something is true, it is necessary apart from anyone wishing it true. Recent articles in The New Scientist and other professional journals suggest that science suffers a bad rap because it so often uncovers bad news. Viruses are developing ahead of our ability to control them; the melting arctic endangers polar bears; the magnetic pole could shift in such a way that the solar wind would strip off our atmosphere. The most difficult matter in science as in any human endeavor is to probe the falsifiability of an idea or theory; we are so eager for our proofs that we do not look for the one example where the subject in question fails the test.
Are we to seek simplicity or distrust it? The answer is yes. In science or any knowledge, we are to use our best tools, whether intellect or instruments, and seek the most elegant and necessary of answers. Frank Herbert in his novel Dune (1965) has one of his minor characters say, “The highest function of ecology is understanding consequences.” Likely true, but we are none of us in possession of the truth. The International Journal of Science Education reported in 2006 that when three sets of adults were exposed to differing presentations on science, each group wound up with more positive views towards science, irrespective of their own choice, but a less scientific one, that science is infallible. After all our efforts, science is only the best knowledge we have at this point. The adversaries to policy corrections on global warming know this and note that we have been wrong about science before – that the sun revolves around the earth, for instance – so we can be wrong now.
What do we do when uncertainty remains? We keep on searching. Real learning is constant. We watch the most relevant, balanced and pertinent programs, follow the hard news first, visit the library and consult the sources that do not come into our own home. We visit museums and take in lectures. We examine what we know and do not know. We have discussions that exchange real information.
Debates over science and the appropriate policy actions will continue as long as the U.S. is a democracy that wants to stay in the forefront of creativity, knowledge, and liberty. As citizens we can do our part, as best we can. For democracy, no one has found a substitute for vigilance.
____
Roger Sween specializes in the art of questions and their answers and therefore in the science of information-seeking behavior.
© 2009 by Roger Sween.
I welcome substantive comments on the contents of this blog. Personal comments to me may be sent to the email address given above.
Friday, January 30, 2009
July 4th
The Peculiar Fourth: a commentary.
Our national days vary in the ways they honor and memorialize features of our civic life. They range from the most individual, Martin Luther King, to the most symbolic, Flag Day. Yet, they center on an origin fundamental to the rest, the 4th of July. The 4th is our most peculiar celebration.
It is peculiar because we celebrate it with fireworks, firepower, parades, martial music and pyrotechnic speeches. It’s been this way since the beginning, even before the beginning when on July 3, 1776, John Adams imagined how future celebrations would be.
It is peculiar because what the 4th of July commemorates is a document, and the resolution that document supports. We don’t even celebrate the ratification of our constitution, as some other nations do, in the way we herald the Declaration of Independence. That declaration, its particular content, and the actions that share in turning its principles into reality are more than memorable. They are the organic foundation of our way of life and the key to every other national holiday.
We may know a little of the chain of events that drove the thirteen colonies to come together in the Continental Congress, beginning September 1774, and to work out common actions. As John Adams wrote home to Abigail, “Yesterday the greatest Question was decided, which ever was debated in America, and a greater perhaps, never was or will be decided among men. A resolution was passed without one dissenting colony 'that these united Colonies, are, and of right ought to be free and independent states.' You will see in a few days a Declaration setting forth the causes, which have impelled us to this mighty Revolution, and the Reasons which will justify it.”
The Continental Congress accepted the one path to which the spiraling conflict with the British had driven it: independence. After amendments of its own, the Congress passed the declaration that its committee reported to them. In time all delegates signed it, including those not present at its hearing and one other seated weeks after the others had signed. What they endorsed and published, upon threat of execution for treason, was a statement of political principles or truths, so widely held as to be self-evident.
One could say that the rest is history, except that ours is neither an automatic history nor a finished one. Though Jefferson and his compatriots had become imbued by natural law (Newton and those who made him popular) and natural rights (chiefly Locke), how these ideas are to work out in political and practical ways has taken the following decades of discussion, trial and refinement.
Are we not still on the way to equality while securing the blessings of life, liberty and happiness? And how have we been persistent to attend to the responsibilities of informed consent in our governance? How have we ever settled questions of rights and justice in representative government when minorities and shifting majorities continue to clash?
To most suitably and profitably address the promise of the 4th of July and thereby rightly celebrate it, first dive into the Declaration of Independence itself. Copies are abundant. Savor its meaning and act upon its living impact. May we be more enlightened from our borning document than from any rocket’s red glare.
_____
© 2006, 2009 by Roger Sween.
First published as “A peculiar Fourth warrants some investigation: commentary,” Republican Eagle (June 28, 2006) 4, and here revised.
I welcome substantive comments on the content of this blog. Personal comments to me may be made to the email address given above.
Our national days vary in the ways they honor and memorialize features of our civic life. They range from the most individual, Martin Luther King, to the most symbolic, Flag Day. Yet, they center on an origin fundamental to the rest, the 4th of July. The 4th is our most peculiar celebration.
It is peculiar because we celebrate it with fireworks, firepower, parades, martial music and pyrotechnic speeches. It’s been this way since the beginning, even before the beginning when on July 3, 1776, John Adams imagined how future celebrations would be.
It is peculiar because what the 4th of July commemorates is a document, and the resolution that document supports. We don’t even celebrate the ratification of our constitution, as some other nations do, in the way we herald the Declaration of Independence. That declaration, its particular content, and the actions that share in turning its principles into reality are more than memorable. They are the organic foundation of our way of life and the key to every other national holiday.
We may know a little of the chain of events that drove the thirteen colonies to come together in the Continental Congress, beginning September 1774, and to work out common actions. As John Adams wrote home to Abigail, “Yesterday the greatest Question was decided, which ever was debated in America, and a greater perhaps, never was or will be decided among men. A resolution was passed without one dissenting colony 'that these united Colonies, are, and of right ought to be free and independent states.' You will see in a few days a Declaration setting forth the causes, which have impelled us to this mighty Revolution, and the Reasons which will justify it.”
The Continental Congress accepted the one path to which the spiraling conflict with the British had driven it: independence. After amendments of its own, the Congress passed the declaration that its committee reported to them. In time all delegates signed it, including those not present at its hearing and one other seated weeks after the others had signed. What they endorsed and published, upon threat of execution for treason, was a statement of political principles or truths, so widely held as to be self-evident.
Twenty-seven statements, offered as facts, substantiate how the King of Great Britain, George III, referred to only as “he,” acted in a tyrannical fashion contrary to the implied ideals of civil government and a free people. Two consequent paragraphs round up the situation: this same king has failed to hear cause for redress. The colonies have no choice but to sever their ties of allegiance and pledge their lives, fortunes and sacred honor in defense of their independent status among the nations of the world.All are created equal and endowed with certain unalienable rights, among them life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. To secure these rights the governed institue governments, but when governments abuse their authority and exercise undue tyranny over rights, it becomes the right and duty of the governed to throw off the oppression.
One could say that the rest is history, except that ours is neither an automatic history nor a finished one. Though Jefferson and his compatriots had become imbued by natural law (Newton and those who made him popular) and natural rights (chiefly Locke), how these ideas are to work out in political and practical ways has taken the following decades of discussion, trial and refinement.
Are we not still on the way to equality while securing the blessings of life, liberty and happiness? And how have we been persistent to attend to the responsibilities of informed consent in our governance? How have we ever settled questions of rights and justice in representative government when minorities and shifting majorities continue to clash?
To most suitably and profitably address the promise of the 4th of July and thereby rightly celebrate it, first dive into the Declaration of Independence itself. Copies are abundant. Savor its meaning and act upon its living impact. May we be more enlightened from our borning document than from any rocket’s red glare.
_____
© 2006, 2009 by Roger Sween.
First published as “A peculiar Fourth warrants some investigation: commentary,” Republican Eagle (June 28, 2006) 4, and here revised.
I welcome substantive comments on the content of this blog. Personal comments to me may be made to the email address given above.
Thursday, January 29, 2009
Values
The Value of Values
Values are in contention with one another in our society and world. Of that observation there is no doubt even though, at some core, values hold us all together. Some will say that antagonistic extreme positions exaggerate our differences and that the middle majority retain the central position as to the values question. Efforts to sort this out elude easy solution despite continued attention to the subject. Nevertheless, some perspective, however limited, is necessary.
Ideally, values comprise a system of qualities of intrinsic and applied worth, expressed in principles, that are severally and interdependently desirable and beneficial to the people individually and collectively who live under that system. So said, the values bundle needs some unraveling to see if this definition really means what it pretends. The question then becomes how a values system applies to us as persons and citizens. Finally, what ought we to do about that application?
We can identify values by thinking about our human situation in order to discover what quality underlies or should underlie good ways of living together. Good ways, simply put, means everyone benefits and no one gets hurt. The thinking approach to values, we call philosophy. Presumably, everybody has a philosophy of life based on personally integrated values whether they have thought them through or been less rigorous about determining the meaning, consistency and excellence of the values adopted.
Such rigor is not for everyone, and the prevailing way of integrating values into one’s life is to absorb them by living in the received culture. While philosophy exists to determine, examine or clarify values, culture nurtures its values by example and reinforces their adoption through approval of the appropriate responses and disapproval of the inappropriate ones. Cultural anthropologists have found that though every one of 5,000 existing cultures has a value system, all values are relative to the particular home culture and that there is no such thing as universal values. As expected, this professional principle of cultural relativism is also in dispute. While some values may be dysfunctional to social and human well being, universally everyone expects treatment with respect.
Religion or recognition of the spiritual dimension also portends values. I say portends, since not all spiritual expressions come across in the same way as to claims on the lives of their believers or explicitness as found in their history of teaching, dogma, or doctrine. A common element of spiritual systems, however, is that they draw upon sources or revelations that are outside the human experiences of thinking or making empirical discoveries about the world and our lives in it. Thereby values gain another context: we ourselves are not the sum and substance of value; some greater entity outside us, yet still somehow related to us is that sum and substance.
Though these three prominent ways of getting at values – the philosophic, cultural and religious – exist and may be the major ones, they are not the only ones. Besides, of course, these methods overlap. We can think about each approach and develop philosophies of them; we can enrich each avenue to values by our cultural traditions and its history of informants; we can peer beyond human limits through religion as to purpose and holism. Though few of us are professionals, especially concerning technicalities, in philosophy, culture, or religion, we are likely to inhabit each approach and can gain from their methods what we have the will to pursue.
When we look about our resident situation, we find that all three approaches to comprehending values, their systems, and imports fail to bring us into cohesion. Part of the problem is that the United States and most of what we have in the three value-determiners before us is not like most of the 5,000 cultures in the world. They are small, bounded, authoritarian, established, and homogenous. We are large, globally enmeshed, democratic, new and changing, and diverse. The very freedom, individualism and expansiveness that we prize and espouse undercut the stability that value systems are supposed to bring to a society. So, we curse one another for the practice of our values and do not have the wit – collectively at least – to find our way out of this troubling achievement.
As a nation, we have so little cohesiveness because we are a bundle of contradictions. We debate, but the debate causes dissension. We adjudicate for justice, but the decisions divide. We multiply choice, particularly in the economic sphere, and are amazed at the lack of taste, decorum, and civic involvement. We accelerate abundance and then surprised by pollution. We expect even grade school children to take the loyalty oath of the Pledge of Allegiance, but fail to exercise the responsibilities of citizenship. We promote globalization, but fail to see ourselves as citizens of the world.
Let us admit that life is complex, but we all start from the same irreducible base. Every individual must sort out their responses to life in five areas. These are the physical conditions of earthly existence, the existence of the self as a distinct entity, the presence of other people, our cultural inheritance, and the possible future. Everything else stems from these five. One may ignore the areas as they choose, but such unconsciousness does not do away with their pressures upon us.
This framework admits that whatever one’s particular culture may be, it has its influences on each of us. But because of the mix of the five areas, no one area is exclusive, and it is dubious to pinpoint any one area, culture included, as dominant when they all interact. We have a difficult enough time fully understanding and directing ourselves with whom we have the greatest proximity and the most control and presumably the fullest knowledge.
Values are the basis on which we consciously or habitually by integration make choices in taking one line of thought, belief or action over another. Values are one cultural product yet remain open, as long as an individual wills it, to personal examination, clarification and redefinition before being adopted, but more significantly after being adopted. Articulated values at variance with the culture when acted upon tend to make critics, rebels, deviants or criminals. Cultures, depending upon the nature of the variance, exert a range of pressures from raised eyebrows to executions in order to gain conformance.
In the physical arena we have issues of the appropriate long-term use of finite natural resources, of population size and viability, of health and of responsibility for the environment in which we cannot but live. For ourselves we face numerous life choices that hover around individual identity, potential, achievement and happiness; here no one can do for us what we must do ourselves. Concerning others, our relationships flow from the private and interpersonal to our roles in the neighborhood, community, economy, political associaton and for the common good. Cultural inheritance, let me emphasize, is a treasure trove of the past up to the very minute during which humanity experienced what we face and need to know if we have wit to learn in order to benefit from such heritage. An evolving culture is open to all of history’s enrichment. By comparison, the future may stretch on as long and potently as the human past, but exactly in what manner we do not know. With such uncertainty comes less clarity and the tendency for less thought and neglect. Thereby, we may be engineering our own extinction and need to consciously chose and create that future most desirable to us.
We cannot address questions of the value-base of culture and society unless we share some working principles. As a career information professional of forty-plus years, I offer the following for consideration.
It is better to know than not know.
·Knowledge, the product of knowing, is imperfect and therefore individuals’ search for truth (the knowledge that is perfect) is unending.
·Consequently, we need to be modest about our own knowledge, and reflective on our own limitations.
·Ambiguity about the certainty of our own knowledge requires psychological security, the realization that our conclusions, though our best at present, are tentative.
·In seeking knowledge and examining our own conclusions, we need criteria, which criteria are also subject to continued examination and improvement.
·Whatever criteria of coherence, currency, verifiability, correspondence with others may be, we must continually test knowledge against experience and attune ourselves to the results.
·We need to be alert to all human weaknesses, especially among ourselves – laziness, distraction, and self-deception – and realize that our knowing requires learning as a continuous endeavor.
·Learning may have its automatic features, that is, learning by living, but the greatest potential for learning comes from focused attention and endeavor to identify and overcome our persistent ignorance and mistaken nature.
In brief, we live profitably by knowledge that we must seek while being humble about what we already know.
I have tried to look deeply into the values question and find that primarily, we are not geared in the mass to share in any but the most token way a commonality on values. Most of our institutions pivot on an assumption of inherent human disagreement and not on the desire for solutions. Our laws arise out of factions where agreements come by compromises at best or overpowering at worst. All these efforts continually model that someone is right while someone else is wrong and that taking up the cudgels, even if the cudgels are words, is the answer.
The answer, the only answer, to our fundamental differences is to be in conversation. Despite the enormous problems identified, global, and often out of our hands, we have plenty of opportunities to do what we can in our spheres of contact to make amends. We can know others face to face, make more friends than enemies, work together for mutual understanding and problem solving, show respect, listen and speak in turn.
In this manner we have a better means to enter the complexity of existence as it is, where always (let us be informed) there is another side. And by conversation, we can find ourselves more fully through our relationships with others. The principal freedom we have and value is the liberating freedom to be neighborly.
_____
© 2007, 2009 by Roger Sween.
Roger Sween admits the heavy influence of his family of origin, a preference for reading as learning, certain formative books read when young, a particular Lutheran rendition of Christianity, a penchant for introspection, rationality and judgment, a love of history as the holistic discipline, and the career frustration that most people do not make routine use of the abundant information and intellectual resources available to them.
First written at the Editor’s request and published in Practical Thinking, v.1 no.2 (December 2005) 1-3. Practical Thinking was a joint publication of the Minnesota Association for Continuing Adult Education and the Minnesota Independent Scholars Forum. That article is here revised.
I welcome substantive comments on the contents of this blog. Personal comments may be made to be at the email address given above.
Values are in contention with one another in our society and world. Of that observation there is no doubt even though, at some core, values hold us all together. Some will say that antagonistic extreme positions exaggerate our differences and that the middle majority retain the central position as to the values question. Efforts to sort this out elude easy solution despite continued attention to the subject. Nevertheless, some perspective, however limited, is necessary.
Ideally, values comprise a system of qualities of intrinsic and applied worth, expressed in principles, that are severally and interdependently desirable and beneficial to the people individually and collectively who live under that system. So said, the values bundle needs some unraveling to see if this definition really means what it pretends. The question then becomes how a values system applies to us as persons and citizens. Finally, what ought we to do about that application?
We can identify values by thinking about our human situation in order to discover what quality underlies or should underlie good ways of living together. Good ways, simply put, means everyone benefits and no one gets hurt. The thinking approach to values, we call philosophy. Presumably, everybody has a philosophy of life based on personally integrated values whether they have thought them through or been less rigorous about determining the meaning, consistency and excellence of the values adopted.
Such rigor is not for everyone, and the prevailing way of integrating values into one’s life is to absorb them by living in the received culture. While philosophy exists to determine, examine or clarify values, culture nurtures its values by example and reinforces their adoption through approval of the appropriate responses and disapproval of the inappropriate ones. Cultural anthropologists have found that though every one of 5,000 existing cultures has a value system, all values are relative to the particular home culture and that there is no such thing as universal values. As expected, this professional principle of cultural relativism is also in dispute. While some values may be dysfunctional to social and human well being, universally everyone expects treatment with respect.
Religion or recognition of the spiritual dimension also portends values. I say portends, since not all spiritual expressions come across in the same way as to claims on the lives of their believers or explicitness as found in their history of teaching, dogma, or doctrine. A common element of spiritual systems, however, is that they draw upon sources or revelations that are outside the human experiences of thinking or making empirical discoveries about the world and our lives in it. Thereby values gain another context: we ourselves are not the sum and substance of value; some greater entity outside us, yet still somehow related to us is that sum and substance.
Though these three prominent ways of getting at values – the philosophic, cultural and religious – exist and may be the major ones, they are not the only ones. Besides, of course, these methods overlap. We can think about each approach and develop philosophies of them; we can enrich each avenue to values by our cultural traditions and its history of informants; we can peer beyond human limits through religion as to purpose and holism. Though few of us are professionals, especially concerning technicalities, in philosophy, culture, or religion, we are likely to inhabit each approach and can gain from their methods what we have the will to pursue.
When we look about our resident situation, we find that all three approaches to comprehending values, their systems, and imports fail to bring us into cohesion. Part of the problem is that the United States and most of what we have in the three value-determiners before us is not like most of the 5,000 cultures in the world. They are small, bounded, authoritarian, established, and homogenous. We are large, globally enmeshed, democratic, new and changing, and diverse. The very freedom, individualism and expansiveness that we prize and espouse undercut the stability that value systems are supposed to bring to a society. So, we curse one another for the practice of our values and do not have the wit – collectively at least – to find our way out of this troubling achievement.
As a nation, we have so little cohesiveness because we are a bundle of contradictions. We debate, but the debate causes dissension. We adjudicate for justice, but the decisions divide. We multiply choice, particularly in the economic sphere, and are amazed at the lack of taste, decorum, and civic involvement. We accelerate abundance and then surprised by pollution. We expect even grade school children to take the loyalty oath of the Pledge of Allegiance, but fail to exercise the responsibilities of citizenship. We promote globalization, but fail to see ourselves as citizens of the world.
Let us admit that life is complex, but we all start from the same irreducible base. Every individual must sort out their responses to life in five areas. These are the physical conditions of earthly existence, the existence of the self as a distinct entity, the presence of other people, our cultural inheritance, and the possible future. Everything else stems from these five. One may ignore the areas as they choose, but such unconsciousness does not do away with their pressures upon us.
This framework admits that whatever one’s particular culture may be, it has its influences on each of us. But because of the mix of the five areas, no one area is exclusive, and it is dubious to pinpoint any one area, culture included, as dominant when they all interact. We have a difficult enough time fully understanding and directing ourselves with whom we have the greatest proximity and the most control and presumably the fullest knowledge.
Values are the basis on which we consciously or habitually by integration make choices in taking one line of thought, belief or action over another. Values are one cultural product yet remain open, as long as an individual wills it, to personal examination, clarification and redefinition before being adopted, but more significantly after being adopted. Articulated values at variance with the culture when acted upon tend to make critics, rebels, deviants or criminals. Cultures, depending upon the nature of the variance, exert a range of pressures from raised eyebrows to executions in order to gain conformance.
In the physical arena we have issues of the appropriate long-term use of finite natural resources, of population size and viability, of health and of responsibility for the environment in which we cannot but live. For ourselves we face numerous life choices that hover around individual identity, potential, achievement and happiness; here no one can do for us what we must do ourselves. Concerning others, our relationships flow from the private and interpersonal to our roles in the neighborhood, community, economy, political associaton and for the common good. Cultural inheritance, let me emphasize, is a treasure trove of the past up to the very minute during which humanity experienced what we face and need to know if we have wit to learn in order to benefit from such heritage. An evolving culture is open to all of history’s enrichment. By comparison, the future may stretch on as long and potently as the human past, but exactly in what manner we do not know. With such uncertainty comes less clarity and the tendency for less thought and neglect. Thereby, we may be engineering our own extinction and need to consciously chose and create that future most desirable to us.
We cannot address questions of the value-base of culture and society unless we share some working principles. As a career information professional of forty-plus years, I offer the following for consideration.
It is better to know than not know.
·Knowledge, the product of knowing, is imperfect and therefore individuals’ search for truth (the knowledge that is perfect) is unending.
·Consequently, we need to be modest about our own knowledge, and reflective on our own limitations.
·Ambiguity about the certainty of our own knowledge requires psychological security, the realization that our conclusions, though our best at present, are tentative.
·In seeking knowledge and examining our own conclusions, we need criteria, which criteria are also subject to continued examination and improvement.
·Whatever criteria of coherence, currency, verifiability, correspondence with others may be, we must continually test knowledge against experience and attune ourselves to the results.
·We need to be alert to all human weaknesses, especially among ourselves – laziness, distraction, and self-deception – and realize that our knowing requires learning as a continuous endeavor.
·Learning may have its automatic features, that is, learning by living, but the greatest potential for learning comes from focused attention and endeavor to identify and overcome our persistent ignorance and mistaken nature.
In brief, we live profitably by knowledge that we must seek while being humble about what we already know.
I have tried to look deeply into the values question and find that primarily, we are not geared in the mass to share in any but the most token way a commonality on values. Most of our institutions pivot on an assumption of inherent human disagreement and not on the desire for solutions. Our laws arise out of factions where agreements come by compromises at best or overpowering at worst. All these efforts continually model that someone is right while someone else is wrong and that taking up the cudgels, even if the cudgels are words, is the answer.
The answer, the only answer, to our fundamental differences is to be in conversation. Despite the enormous problems identified, global, and often out of our hands, we have plenty of opportunities to do what we can in our spheres of contact to make amends. We can know others face to face, make more friends than enemies, work together for mutual understanding and problem solving, show respect, listen and speak in turn.
In this manner we have a better means to enter the complexity of existence as it is, where always (let us be informed) there is another side. And by conversation, we can find ourselves more fully through our relationships with others. The principal freedom we have and value is the liberating freedom to be neighborly.
_____
© 2007, 2009 by Roger Sween.
Roger Sween admits the heavy influence of his family of origin, a preference for reading as learning, certain formative books read when young, a particular Lutheran rendition of Christianity, a penchant for introspection, rationality and judgment, a love of history as the holistic discipline, and the career frustration that most people do not make routine use of the abundant information and intellectual resources available to them.
First written at the Editor’s request and published in Practical Thinking, v.1 no.2 (December 2005) 1-3. Practical Thinking was a joint publication of the Minnesota Association for Continuing Adult Education and the Minnesota Independent Scholars Forum. That article is here revised.
I welcome substantive comments on the contents of this blog. Personal comments may be made to be at the email address given above.
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Why Read?
Twenty Answers to the Question
1. Reading is for everyone because it is not all one thing.
2. Many kinds of reading exist: people read different things for different reasons, and they read differently at different times, including at different times in their lives.
3. People read for fun, to amuse and occupy themselves, to be up on what others are reading and talking about, to learn and know things, to explore themselves, to travel outside themselves and away from their locations, to gain from other’s lives, thinking or imagination what they have to say beyond one’s own experience.
4. Reading is at times technical, practical, entertaining, adventuresome, playful, silly, poetic, serious, matter-of-fact, fantastic, mysterious, symbolic, mystical, argumentative, political, informative, worshipful, philosophical, historical, questioning, advising, model-making, or many other dimensions.
5. Because reading is individualized for different people, readers read what they like feel good while reading, feel rewarded for having read and enjoy themselves during the process of reading and afterwards as they think about and talk about what they have read.
6. There is little point in reading what you don’t like. Enough other things exist to read than to spend time with something that doesn’t make you want to read it. Even things you are told you have to read and may not like, you can often find something else that substitutes for them.
7. Reading is a lifetime skill, except that you cannot predict what kind of reading you might need or want to do in the future.
8. Reading is developmental, that is, you gain reading ability by reading, and there is no other way, no short cut, no way to know reading except to read. Some things are easy to read, and some things are hard. The Constitution of the United States, for example, is at the 22d grade level or senior year in college; if you want to be good in reading at that level, you need to just keep on reading.
9. Because reading is developmental, for most people the practice of reading will readily put a person’s abilities beyond the average for their age level. Those who have reading difficulties, when they are detected, can also become a successful reader.
10. Reading is more fundamentally human than any technology. Reading is older than paper, older than the English language, older than printing presses, older than computers and the Internet. We will still have reading should all the newspapers, magazines, books, and love letters disappear.
11. People either want to read things by themselves and mull over them in their heads or read them as part of a group and talk to others about them. Both ways make sense.
12. Reading is portable, cheap, flexible and beneficial. Be prepared: have something to read with you at all times.
13. Reading can become habitual. Of course, reading is not automatic; readers have to set aside time to read. Since we all have the same 24 hours a day, reading requires choosing when to do it. No one time fits all.
14. Reading is discovery. Anything not yet read is a deep, dark unknown, and we are often reluctant to pick up something new because we don’t know if we’ll like it. So look it over, examine the clues—cover comments, introduction, contents listing, beginning pages, here and there in the book. If it seems promising, give it a try; if that doesn’t work, go on to something else.
15. Reading has a tendency to continue ever onward, and it is impossible to read everything, even everything that you might think is important and good to read. Reading proceeds by choosing what to read, and there are plenty of guides to what to read next, but the best one is what your own reading suggests.
16. Reading is a basis of relationships, between classmates and friends, within families and between parents and children, between students and teachers, between co-workers, between neighbors, between members of the same organization, among and between faith communities and within civic communities.
17. Reading is the basis of most work from the 20th century onward in knowledge-based and information-oriented societies.
18. Reading is a basis of learning and of continued learning across the lifespan. And reading is independent of any institution except bookstores and libraries, both of which only exist to help you find what you want.
19. Reading is the key to our past, both the immediate past and of ages past. Then people—some like us, some more informed and wiser—took the time to write down their experiences and their thoughts for our benefit. If we want to, we can take advantage of what they had to say.
20. Reading is an investment in one’s own personal future. Reading is stocking up stories, information, knowledge, narrative and expression for the times we need to draw on what we’ve read, to remember, talk, think, figure out, know and consider some challenge or some future state of being from the fund of past reading experiences.
_____
© 2001 by Roger Sween.
This listing of 20 responses to the question Why Read? by Roger Sween was written in response to a request on reasons for high school students to read asked by Jane Prestebak and first posted on the MEMO-L listserv in November 2001. The MEMO co-presidents subsequently with permission distributed the list at the pre-conference on reading at the American Association of School Librarians that fall. At the request of Judy Bull MEMOrandom (February 2002), the newsletter of the Minnesota Educational Media Organization, published the list with permission.
I welcome substantive comments on the contents of this bloog. Personal comments may be sent to me at my email address given above.
1. Reading is for everyone because it is not all one thing.
2. Many kinds of reading exist: people read different things for different reasons, and they read differently at different times, including at different times in their lives.
3. People read for fun, to amuse and occupy themselves, to be up on what others are reading and talking about, to learn and know things, to explore themselves, to travel outside themselves and away from their locations, to gain from other’s lives, thinking or imagination what they have to say beyond one’s own experience.
4. Reading is at times technical, practical, entertaining, adventuresome, playful, silly, poetic, serious, matter-of-fact, fantastic, mysterious, symbolic, mystical, argumentative, political, informative, worshipful, philosophical, historical, questioning, advising, model-making, or many other dimensions.
5. Because reading is individualized for different people, readers read what they like feel good while reading, feel rewarded for having read and enjoy themselves during the process of reading and afterwards as they think about and talk about what they have read.
6. There is little point in reading what you don’t like. Enough other things exist to read than to spend time with something that doesn’t make you want to read it. Even things you are told you have to read and may not like, you can often find something else that substitutes for them.
7. Reading is a lifetime skill, except that you cannot predict what kind of reading you might need or want to do in the future.
8. Reading is developmental, that is, you gain reading ability by reading, and there is no other way, no short cut, no way to know reading except to read. Some things are easy to read, and some things are hard. The Constitution of the United States, for example, is at the 22d grade level or senior year in college; if you want to be good in reading at that level, you need to just keep on reading.
9. Because reading is developmental, for most people the practice of reading will readily put a person’s abilities beyond the average for their age level. Those who have reading difficulties, when they are detected, can also become a successful reader.
10. Reading is more fundamentally human than any technology. Reading is older than paper, older than the English language, older than printing presses, older than computers and the Internet. We will still have reading should all the newspapers, magazines, books, and love letters disappear.
11. People either want to read things by themselves and mull over them in their heads or read them as part of a group and talk to others about them. Both ways make sense.
12. Reading is portable, cheap, flexible and beneficial. Be prepared: have something to read with you at all times.
13. Reading can become habitual. Of course, reading is not automatic; readers have to set aside time to read. Since we all have the same 24 hours a day, reading requires choosing when to do it. No one time fits all.
14. Reading is discovery. Anything not yet read is a deep, dark unknown, and we are often reluctant to pick up something new because we don’t know if we’ll like it. So look it over, examine the clues—cover comments, introduction, contents listing, beginning pages, here and there in the book. If it seems promising, give it a try; if that doesn’t work, go on to something else.
15. Reading has a tendency to continue ever onward, and it is impossible to read everything, even everything that you might think is important and good to read. Reading proceeds by choosing what to read, and there are plenty of guides to what to read next, but the best one is what your own reading suggests.
16. Reading is a basis of relationships, between classmates and friends, within families and between parents and children, between students and teachers, between co-workers, between neighbors, between members of the same organization, among and between faith communities and within civic communities.
17. Reading is the basis of most work from the 20th century onward in knowledge-based and information-oriented societies.
18. Reading is a basis of learning and of continued learning across the lifespan. And reading is independent of any institution except bookstores and libraries, both of which only exist to help you find what you want.
19. Reading is the key to our past, both the immediate past and of ages past. Then people—some like us, some more informed and wiser—took the time to write down their experiences and their thoughts for our benefit. If we want to, we can take advantage of what they had to say.
20. Reading is an investment in one’s own personal future. Reading is stocking up stories, information, knowledge, narrative and expression for the times we need to draw on what we’ve read, to remember, talk, think, figure out, know and consider some challenge or some future state of being from the fund of past reading experiences.
_____
© 2001 by Roger Sween.
This listing of 20 responses to the question Why Read? by Roger Sween was written in response to a request on reasons for high school students to read asked by Jane Prestebak and first posted on the MEMO-L listserv in November 2001. The MEMO co-presidents subsequently with permission distributed the list at the pre-conference on reading at the American Association of School Librarians that fall. At the request of Judy Bull MEMOrandom (February 2002), the newsletter of the Minnesota Educational Media Organization, published the list with permission.
I welcome substantive comments on the contents of this bloog. Personal comments may be sent to me at my email address given above.
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Classics
The Classics Question
The question of the role of the classics is hot right now. This issue is not new. As long as there has been literature, the audience has been at odds as to what is worthwhile and what is not. But in time, certain books and certain authors gain canonical influence; we regard them as the standards.
The argument over the classics is without resolve and difficult to bring to application; the facts evade and challenge any easy generalization. Instead of a quantity approach as to how many people read what, let us start from quality, an approach based on admitted observations and values. Here the predisposition is that some books are better than others are, and accordingly, it is better for readers to pay attention to them. Cues come from a couple of authors who are
“classic” in the original sense; they wrote in Latin and came from the first class of citizens.
Cicero, an industrious provincial, so rigorously applied himself to study and self-improvement that he became the most noted Roman orator of his day. In so doing, he gained great political influence and suffered many enemies. In his later years, he labored to preserve the republic against dictatorship and to pass on to his compatriots the learning inherited from the Greeks. Towards the end of On the Orator, he says
To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain forever a child. For what is the gain in human existence, unless it be woven into the lives of our ancestors through the records of history? – De Oratore, III, 120 (55 BCE).
Quintillian, an admirer of Cicero, came along a century later. He headed Rome’s foremost school of oratory, the first to be paid at state expense, taught the Emperor Domitian’s grand-
nephews, and received from Emperor Vespasian the designation “Professor of Rhetoric.” In retirement, he wrote The Training of the Orator that is in part a technical work. Of greater value is his declaration on the principles of education, including character formation from earliest
childhood, and reviews of prior Greek and Latin literature.
…I have already said that some profit may be derived from every author. But we must wait till our powers have been developed and established to the full before we turn to these poets. Similarly, at banquets we take our fill of the best fare and then turn to other food that, in spite of its comparative inferiority, is still attractive owing to its variety. …But until we have acquired that assured facility of which I spoke, we must form our minds and develop an appropriate tone by reading that is deep rather than wide – Institutio Oratoria, X, 1, 58-59 (ca. 95 CE).
The values implicit in the classical approach are that each individual lives in the long run of history, shares an inherited culture, and develops in association with the others who surround and interact through everyday life. So to mature into the society and to equip oneself for the fullest opportunity and development, learners will necessarily, as appropriate to them, hone in first on the best sources of the human experience to gain knowledge and understanding. Since young learners have no way to know what is best for them, it is left to their seniors to responsibly lead the way.
You can see that the classical position is based upon an enormous assumption: parents, teachers and other exemplars know their duty and will tend to it. In fact, the upper classes
of Rome often left their children in the hands of unlettered slaves, just as today children are babysat by an indifferent television. And so we must admit that routine reading has always been a minority activity, and intensive reading of the classics, as Quintillian wanted, an activity with an even smaller minority.
We are hard pressed to find any book that is shared among the population as a whole or among any majority of it. The 39 books of the Old Testament canon, a library of varied writing in itself, likely come closest, but even this possibility does not quite fill the bill. When was the last time any random group of people launched into a discussion on the anguish of Job, the bravery of Esther, the tragedies of King David, or the wondrous poetry of the Psalms?
We are so imbued with notions of equality; as educators and librarians we want everyone to have every opportunity and consequent success in equal proportion. We castigate ourselves when we fail at this goal; we hang back from initiatives unless they are going to reach everyone. Yet what can we do in the face of the undeniable realities that daunt us?
Are the classics in decline? Quintillian 1900 years ago thought so then. Yet they do not go away in total. In 1998 an advisory panel to the Modern Library imprint of Random House selected the 100 best English language novels of the Twentieth century. See Newsweek (3August 1998) 64-65. That August I owned 69 of the 100 and my local public library had a comparable number, though a different mix of titles. However, the combined public libraries of the southeast region had all but one. That was Henry Green’s Loving (1945), not a title on the tip of anyone’s tongue.
A standby guide for library acquisitions is The Readers Adviser that over the 20th century grew to 6 volumes comprising approximately 45,000 entries. All of the titles listed in a full range of subjects are judged to be “the best” of their particular field or genre. Another more focused
volume, Literature Lover’s Companion (2001), calls itself “the essential reference to the world’s greatest writers – past and present, popular and classical.” It touts the works of over 1000 authors from Homer, 9th century BCE, to Ben Okri, a Nigerian, born in 1959. Five to eight titles represent most authors. These two guides recommend items for first purchase in greater number than most libraries hold.
We need also to recognize that one influence of the classics is an indirect one, through their effect on the writing of other authors. About twenty years ago, two Minnesota state university professors surveyed entering students at Mankato state as to their favorite authors. Hands down, the favorite was Stephen King. These students as seniors answered the same survey four years later to show how their tastes had changed. And the favorite was Stephen King, a discovery that brought considerable alarm to academics. In 2000, King published “a memoir of the craft” On Writing. In an appendix, he credits his reading of other authors as making him a writer and lists about 100 entertaining books. Most are contemporary to King, but among them are Heart of Darkness (1902), The Moon and Sixpence (1919), As I Lay Dying (1930), Brideshead Revisited (1945), A Death in the Family (1957) and Our Man in Havana (1959).
Currently, Francine Prose, a well-established writer, but no Stephen King as to popularity, harked back to Quintillian’s emphasis on intensive reading by pointing out how a number of classic authors achieved their successes. Her appendix of 115 titles in Reading Like a Writer (2006) is definitely more literary than King’s and shares only two titles with his preferences, Raymond Carver’s Where I’m Calling From and Richard Price’s Freedomland. Among the older titles Prose lists are Sophocles’ Oedipus in the Young translation, the medieval Song of Roland in Sayer’s translation, Shakespeare’s King Lear, Milton’s Paradise Lost and Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Two by Austen, now enjoying a great revival of interest, start off the 19th century – Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility. Curiously, she also lists Loving, the absent title mentioned above, along with another of Green’s novels, Doting.
That King and Prose have two entirely different takes on reading and writing is typical and highlights the basic situation. We are so overrun with good books that the constant question remains: how do the classics fit in?
While many choices as to title emphasis are possible, I recommend the following overall principles and objectives.
• Everyone should come to understand that relatively few books out of the millions published have lasting influence.
• Books of the past have more than historical importance when they speak to the continuance of human experience; these books continue to affect and change lives.
• These books provide a common ground to understanding ourselves amongst others.
• As works of art, classics are meant for enjoyment, not study, and never picked to pieces.
• Because such books last through time, one can reread them during a lifetime with increased pleasure and greater understanding.
• To whet the appetite for such reading, families, libraries and teachers need to provide, model and encourage quality choices as their charges develop their own personalities, interests and abilities.
• Worthy titles are those that provide readers both enough attainment for satisfaction and additional enticement for more books.
• Everyone should recognize that it takes more than a lifetime to read all the most highly recommended books.
• Everyone should learn how to pursue and obtain more books than are readily or easily available.
I believe that to some extent, we all work towards these ends. The challenge is to do it more consistently, with more resources, and more enthusiasm.
_____
“The Classics Question” appeared in an earlier version in MEMOrandom, v.16 no.4 (January 2007) 6-7, and is here revised.
© 2007, 2009 by Roger Sween.
I welcome substantive comments on the content in this blog. Personal comments may be sent to me at my email address given above.
The question of the role of the classics is hot right now. This issue is not new. As long as there has been literature, the audience has been at odds as to what is worthwhile and what is not. But in time, certain books and certain authors gain canonical influence; we regard them as the standards.
The argument over the classics is without resolve and difficult to bring to application; the facts evade and challenge any easy generalization. Instead of a quantity approach as to how many people read what, let us start from quality, an approach based on admitted observations and values. Here the predisposition is that some books are better than others are, and accordingly, it is better for readers to pay attention to them. Cues come from a couple of authors who are
“classic” in the original sense; they wrote in Latin and came from the first class of citizens.
Cicero, an industrious provincial, so rigorously applied himself to study and self-improvement that he became the most noted Roman orator of his day. In so doing, he gained great political influence and suffered many enemies. In his later years, he labored to preserve the republic against dictatorship and to pass on to his compatriots the learning inherited from the Greeks. Towards the end of On the Orator, he says
To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain forever a child. For what is the gain in human existence, unless it be woven into the lives of our ancestors through the records of history? – De Oratore, III, 120 (55 BCE).
Quintillian, an admirer of Cicero, came along a century later. He headed Rome’s foremost school of oratory, the first to be paid at state expense, taught the Emperor Domitian’s grand-
nephews, and received from Emperor Vespasian the designation “Professor of Rhetoric.” In retirement, he wrote The Training of the Orator that is in part a technical work. Of greater value is his declaration on the principles of education, including character formation from earliest
childhood, and reviews of prior Greek and Latin literature.
…I have already said that some profit may be derived from every author. But we must wait till our powers have been developed and established to the full before we turn to these poets. Similarly, at banquets we take our fill of the best fare and then turn to other food that, in spite of its comparative inferiority, is still attractive owing to its variety. …But until we have acquired that assured facility of which I spoke, we must form our minds and develop an appropriate tone by reading that is deep rather than wide – Institutio Oratoria, X, 1, 58-59 (ca. 95 CE).
The values implicit in the classical approach are that each individual lives in the long run of history, shares an inherited culture, and develops in association with the others who surround and interact through everyday life. So to mature into the society and to equip oneself for the fullest opportunity and development, learners will necessarily, as appropriate to them, hone in first on the best sources of the human experience to gain knowledge and understanding. Since young learners have no way to know what is best for them, it is left to their seniors to responsibly lead the way.
You can see that the classical position is based upon an enormous assumption: parents, teachers and other exemplars know their duty and will tend to it. In fact, the upper classes
of Rome often left their children in the hands of unlettered slaves, just as today children are babysat by an indifferent television. And so we must admit that routine reading has always been a minority activity, and intensive reading of the classics, as Quintillian wanted, an activity with an even smaller minority.
We are hard pressed to find any book that is shared among the population as a whole or among any majority of it. The 39 books of the Old Testament canon, a library of varied writing in itself, likely come closest, but even this possibility does not quite fill the bill. When was the last time any random group of people launched into a discussion on the anguish of Job, the bravery of Esther, the tragedies of King David, or the wondrous poetry of the Psalms?
We are so imbued with notions of equality; as educators and librarians we want everyone to have every opportunity and consequent success in equal proportion. We castigate ourselves when we fail at this goal; we hang back from initiatives unless they are going to reach everyone. Yet what can we do in the face of the undeniable realities that daunt us?
Are the classics in decline? Quintillian 1900 years ago thought so then. Yet they do not go away in total. In 1998 an advisory panel to the Modern Library imprint of Random House selected the 100 best English language novels of the Twentieth century. See Newsweek (3August 1998) 64-65. That August I owned 69 of the 100 and my local public library had a comparable number, though a different mix of titles. However, the combined public libraries of the southeast region had all but one. That was Henry Green’s Loving (1945), not a title on the tip of anyone’s tongue.
A standby guide for library acquisitions is The Readers Adviser that over the 20th century grew to 6 volumes comprising approximately 45,000 entries. All of the titles listed in a full range of subjects are judged to be “the best” of their particular field or genre. Another more focused
volume, Literature Lover’s Companion (2001), calls itself “the essential reference to the world’s greatest writers – past and present, popular and classical.” It touts the works of over 1000 authors from Homer, 9th century BCE, to Ben Okri, a Nigerian, born in 1959. Five to eight titles represent most authors. These two guides recommend items for first purchase in greater number than most libraries hold.
We need also to recognize that one influence of the classics is an indirect one, through their effect on the writing of other authors. About twenty years ago, two Minnesota state university professors surveyed entering students at Mankato state as to their favorite authors. Hands down, the favorite was Stephen King. These students as seniors answered the same survey four years later to show how their tastes had changed. And the favorite was Stephen King, a discovery that brought considerable alarm to academics. In 2000, King published “a memoir of the craft” On Writing. In an appendix, he credits his reading of other authors as making him a writer and lists about 100 entertaining books. Most are contemporary to King, but among them are Heart of Darkness (1902), The Moon and Sixpence (1919), As I Lay Dying (1930), Brideshead Revisited (1945), A Death in the Family (1957) and Our Man in Havana (1959).
Currently, Francine Prose, a well-established writer, but no Stephen King as to popularity, harked back to Quintillian’s emphasis on intensive reading by pointing out how a number of classic authors achieved their successes. Her appendix of 115 titles in Reading Like a Writer (2006) is definitely more literary than King’s and shares only two titles with his preferences, Raymond Carver’s Where I’m Calling From and Richard Price’s Freedomland. Among the older titles Prose lists are Sophocles’ Oedipus in the Young translation, the medieval Song of Roland in Sayer’s translation, Shakespeare’s King Lear, Milton’s Paradise Lost and Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Two by Austen, now enjoying a great revival of interest, start off the 19th century – Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility. Curiously, she also lists Loving, the absent title mentioned above, along with another of Green’s novels, Doting.
That King and Prose have two entirely different takes on reading and writing is typical and highlights the basic situation. We are so overrun with good books that the constant question remains: how do the classics fit in?
While many choices as to title emphasis are possible, I recommend the following overall principles and objectives.
• Everyone should come to understand that relatively few books out of the millions published have lasting influence.
• Books of the past have more than historical importance when they speak to the continuance of human experience; these books continue to affect and change lives.
• These books provide a common ground to understanding ourselves amongst others.
• As works of art, classics are meant for enjoyment, not study, and never picked to pieces.
• Because such books last through time, one can reread them during a lifetime with increased pleasure and greater understanding.
• To whet the appetite for such reading, families, libraries and teachers need to provide, model and encourage quality choices as their charges develop their own personalities, interests and abilities.
• Worthy titles are those that provide readers both enough attainment for satisfaction and additional enticement for more books.
• Everyone should recognize that it takes more than a lifetime to read all the most highly recommended books.
• Everyone should learn how to pursue and obtain more books than are readily or easily available.
I believe that to some extent, we all work towards these ends. The challenge is to do it more consistently, with more resources, and more enthusiasm.
_____
“The Classics Question” appeared in an earlier version in MEMOrandom, v.16 no.4 (January 2007) 6-7, and is here revised.
© 2007, 2009 by Roger Sween.
I welcome substantive comments on the content in this blog. Personal comments may be sent to me at my email address given above.
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