RSSThe humanities? LOLZ!
Sep 09
From Our Guest Bloggers humanities, public libraries No Comments
If you believe as I do that the fates of the humanities and of public libraries are intertwined, then Mark Slouka’s essay in the September issue of Harper’s on the decline of the humanities at the expense of math and science in American education, and in our society more broadly, is not very encouraging.
Why should we, librarians and friends of libraries, care about the state of the humanities? Slouka makes quite a persuasive case that’s worth quoting at length:
Because they complicate our vision, pull our most cherished notions out by the roots, flay our pieties. Because they grow uncertainty. Because they expand the reach of our understanding (and therefore our compassion), even as they force us to draw and redraw the borders of our tolerance. Because out of all this work of self-building might emerge an individual capable of humility in the face of complexity; an individual formed through questioning and therefore unlikely to cede that right; an individual resistant to coercion, to manipulation and demagoguery in all their forms. The humanities, in short, are a superb delivery mechanism for what we might call democratic values. There is no better that I am aware of.
As anger, irrationality, and profound ignorance threaten to overwhelm the public debate on something as important as healthcare reform, it pretty clear that a revival of the values that animate the best aspects of the humanities would do much to benefit not just the quality of public discourse, but the quality of our everyday lives as well.
Libraries, especially public libraries, would seem to be an especially important incubator of these values, but in too many cases it seems as if the public library has almost completely abandoned its traditional role as a university of the people. If math and science drowns out the humanities in public education, a cult of technology and pop culture trend-hopping performs a similar function in the public library. A recent article on CNN.com shows how many public library administrators around the country are disturbingly sanguine about the idea of a library in which gaming, online social networking, and other technological distractions crowd out books, the humanities, and the kind of literate culture that they represent. It seems to me that libraries should be providing people an alternative place which nurtures values endangered in a society awash in hyper-stimulating digital media and attention sapping triviality. What’s the value in having a community center in which the discussion increasingly resembles a jumble of blathering Twitter feeds?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not arguing against having any entertaining programming or technological innovation in the library. It’s neither possible nor desirable to have a public library where everyone sits around doing nothing but contemplating the pleasures of reading Boethius and lamenting the loss of the card catalog. But it seems to me that the balance has been tipped much too far in the other direction by loud voices that may not even represent the opinions and experiences of most librarians (I would venture a guess that the proportion of my library’s patrons that are functionally illiterate easily outnumbers the proportion that even understands what social networking is). What can we do to even things out?
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