The stupid prep school
By adamg - 9/7/09 - 2:12 pm
Candelaria Silva is aghast that some prep school in Ashburnham has dismantled its library in favor of, well, a media room:
... That a school would lead the way into this stupid new world is disturbing for a number of reasons, not least of which is that this move will not encourage students to read book length works.
Once again, I am struck by how so many in our society engage in either/or thinking (electronic or paper) rather than both/and. This is a false choice because the two media can and do so perfectly coexist and complement each other. ...
Comments
What a terrible move!
I teach media literacy/video production and I fear a generation of producers of content in electronic media who are not well-read. Literature and Media Lit. need each other.
Blah, I read about this the
Blah, I read about this the other day in the Globe, and to say I was horrified doesn't even begin to describe how I feel about this.
I too was floored by that
I too was floored by that article the other day. If my children were students there I would pull them out tomorrow. I sincerely hope that the parents are as enraged as the hundreds of commentors on the globe site. If so this headmaster has dug his own professional grave, though his logic sounds well suited to be the next Brandeis prez.
When I was in high school
When I was in high school the library had 90 percent of its space taken up by books that nobody used and only a few computers which had lines. The books were all pretty much useless and outdated by the time we got them.
When I was in college the library at Salem State was pretty big and mostly books. Once again the computers had lines and people only slept between classes on the couches in the book section. I believe they closed that building and am not sure if it has been reopened since I left. The books were all outdated.
I think books are important and I hope that places will keep some on hand for reading but lets not pretend like the aisles of these libraries had kids crammed into them sucking up knowledge.
This is coming from a guy who has lugged 4 heavy boxes of personal books with him every time he has moved because I could not bear to part with them. I use the internet for most things and books have their use as well.
Was gonna say something similar
Remember too that the kids going to this school are certainly kids who come from homes full of books and who are regular visitors to the public library. It isn't like this is a public school where it's the only place a lot of the kids have ever thumbed through a book.
I don't know enough of the background, but the school may be small enough that it makes more sense not to try and keep books up to date and to have kids use larger public and academic libraries when a hard-copy book is the right tool for the job.
Also, do we know if the school is keeping books at all? Will they be reading assigned literature from books? Schools often have sets of 25 copies of Catcher in the Rye and whatnot that are kept in a teaching storage place, not the library.
I definitely think it makes sense to do away with textbooks for most subjects. (Math is an exception, I think). They're ridiculously expensive, and it's hard to find a text that's exactly what the teacher wants to teach, so good teachers end up using a lot of supplementary texts and articles anyway, and having kids do projects and papers instead of answering the pre-fab questions in the text. They also take years to produce and are out of date by the time they come out. I went to an undergrad school and a graduate school that both used very few textbooks. Books, absolutely, but books produced as textbooks, hardly at all.
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More on textbooks
Another HUGE problem for textbooks in this country is that they are profit-driven as opposed to knowledge-driven. This means that publishers create their textbook based on the biggest market(s) (basically, Texas Public Schools) and then expect everyone else to buy that textbook and deal with it because they're the only ones making the textbook (not a big money making venture unless you corner the entire market on it). Therefore, if Texas says 2+2=7, then Vermont has to say 2+2=7...or do as Eeka says and ignore that chapter, use supplemental materials, etc.
Digital textbooks wouldn't suffer this same problem. AND on top of that, it introduces another point against the original rant which is "content manipulation". In terms of the blog being discussed, she's worried about digital CENSORSHIP (oh noes, Mr. Bill!). But what about GOOD content manipulation, like UPDATING? A digital textbook could be updated continuously so that students were always getting the latest and most accurate information. Errors could easily be corrected. Encyclopedias could include new worthwhile articles (a la Wikipedia) without taking a year AND requiring the school to buy an entire new, costly edition for a few measly edits.
Having gone to three
Having gone to three colleges with well conceived and curated collections I can speak to the value of books beyond the meager 20,000 volume collection here. Still, collections of literature, histories, and arts seldom spoil. it seems to me that the library at Cushing suffers from neglect and mismanagement that only continues with this story. That espresso machine (much more the cost of this overhaul) would go a long way toward building a strong and useful collection.
Ten or fifteen years ago,
Ten or fifteen years ago, there was a constant stream of stories in the media about writers and journalists who boasted of refusing to use word processing. "I use my old Royal. It was good enough for Hemingway, dammit, and it's good enough for me!" When was the last time you read one of those stories? Students will all have Kindle-type reading devices pretty soon anyway, what's to worry? Gutenberg is dead - get used to it. And yes, the vast majority of books in any school library sit forlornly ignored in the stacks. When I was a student at UMASS-Boston in the early '90s, I cracked many books' bindings for the first time. No one else had touched them since they were purchased. School libraries could certainly dump 90% of their books to storage and no one would notice.
However...
surely a school should at least have the *option* of books? I think it says something that no other schools or libraries are even considering such a move, to my knowledge.
Yes
It says we don't give our schools enough money.
I think in this case we are
I think in this case we are talking about kids with the means to get those books with it being the type of school it is and all. Most of the classics are carried by Barnes and Nobles which surely has an outpost in the area as well. Ive spent many hours sitting in a BN just reading without being pushed out by the staff, I did it much more as a teen because I did not have the cash to buy the books. You take a notebook with you and mark the edition you were reading and the page you left off on and come back later. Just as good as a book mark and as long as you do not harm the books the store people are great. Every so often you would get one that would check out the books you were carrying and she give you another one that she thought you would like.
Were not talking about inner city kids with no other options... although the BPL is quite fantastic and I know of at least one private Boston school that sends their kids to the BPL rather then try to recreate the wheel.
No Barnes & Noble in Ashburnham
This is a tiny rural town, remember. According to BN.com, their nearest store is in Leominster, 10 miles away. The 9th and 10th graders certainly don't have cars; perhaps some of the juniors and seniors might.
The nearest Borders is even further away, in Nashua NH. IndieBound.com shows a couple of independent bookstores in Fitchburg, but that's still not exactly walking distance.
Pedantic
Way to miss the forest for the trees. There's not much of anything in Ashburnham. I'm pretty sure that a high schooler going to a private academy, like Cushing is, can find their way to a mall whenever they want, somehow...a mall with a bookstore even. That's his point.
how would a rural high schooler without a car get to a mall?
The nearest one is probably in Fitchburg, Leominster, or Nashua (see above). The BN.com and Borders.com store finders include their mall bookstores (called B Dalton or Waldenbooks or Borders Express), and none are in or near Ashburnham.
Perhaps they'd ride a bike in nice weather, but not in January.
Rural high schooler?
This is a private boarding school. The students are from all over the U.S. and the school brags about providing weekend excursions to Boston to let the students go to the museums, stores, and everywhere else in the city. Also, 12% are day students, who have to be driven to campus anyways...
This isn't a public school in West Bumblescrew, Kansas where the students walk 5 miles barefoot to class each day...
I'm a Chelsea boy and at the
I'm a Chelsea boy and at the time my father was a garbage man and my mother a secretary and I somehow ended up in these stores, and that was without taking the MBTA. We were not well off by any means but I had a steady stream of books and my mother made sure I got to the library or book store on a regular basis if I wanted to go. I am sure that parents who send their children to a private boarding school that runs regular trips to Boston can make this work. Most classic books are actually quite cheap if you buy the Dover edition.
Swing and a miss...
This woman is naive to the ways that digital media works.
The entire screed is easily rebutted by the Kindle technology alone in its ability to do all the things she incorrectly claims paper media does better. It feels as though what she's written is more of a knee-jerk reaction than a well-considered opposition to this school's move to digital media.
On top of that, the books actually limit the school's amount of literary works that it can expose the kids to, whereas the only thing limiting them now is what they purchase and how big their hard drive space is. This is something she doesn't address at all.
The only thing books do now that something like the Kindle can not is look regal on the shelf. Libraries with tons of books on their shelves look awesome and wise. But I'd rather be smart and carry them all in my backpack on a Kindle and maybe a spare hard drive or two.
two things
Two things paper books do better than a Kindle:
1. In 100 years, you'll still be able to read a paper book. Good luck reading that e-text in 100 years. As a trivial example, how many people still have 5.25" floppy drives hanging around? (For that matter, the 3.5" floppy is well on its way to obsolescence too--I don't think most modern computers come with one any more.)
2. The publisher of a book cannot rescind your ability to read it on a whim via DRM. This has already happened with the Kindle--amusingly enough, with 1984 and Animal Farm. A dead-tree book is sold. An e-book is licensed, and that's a critical difference.
Already gone
I haven't owned a computer with a floppy drive since 1999.
The pieces of shit my company buys still ship with them, but I don't think anyone ever puts anything in them.
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Come on...
1) Try reading a book in 100 years that wasn't kept well or that was read heavily (hell, some books don't make it 100 weeks if they're thumbed through a lot). Also, what makes you think that computer files from the eras of 5.25" floppy disks are somehow lost just because the media is gone? Haven't you ever heard of emulators? I can still play Atari games these days if I want to. I have programs and files from the 80's on my computer and some of my work files are written in old, old languages like Fortran (originally written in the 50's). So, "good luck reading that e-text in 100 years"...uh, why do you think that's going to be a problem?
2) DRM is an issue. No fight from me there. I don't remember endorsing that as part of the move to digital media. E-books can easily be "sold" just like a dead-tree book, free from DRM, and be made available to share/copy. In fact, Project Gutenberg is created around this exact mission: to encourage creation and distribution of eBooks. So many great books on Project Gutenberg are available for FREE (as in beer) from the public domain and therefore free (as in speech) of DRM and easily shared from one person to the next, including the two you mentioned, 1984 and Animal Farm (albeit from Gutenburg Australia). I also feel it's just a matter of time before Amazon introduces their "free samples" (usually the first chapter) of Kindle books with the Kindle and one Kindle could wirelessly send that sample at the very least to another Kindle user. So, while there's a tug-of-war between making more eBooks free (as in beer AND speech) and still protecting the rights of the content creators and sellers, there's still plenty of options that make this less of an issue than people like to make it.
I also think it's a moot point for this specific case of the academy since any book that one student might want to share with another could be gotten by the latter student directly from the digital library anyways. In fact, if the library would have only had ONE copy of a book, they likely have it setup now as a central copy that can be licensed out to multiple readers at the same time for less than the cost of having purchased multiple copies to begin with (in fact, most eBooks are actually cheaper than their paper counterparts since creating multiple copies for the publisher is essentially free in comparison to printing multiple books). So, *licensing* a book isn't actually an evil thing in the case of site licensing...but people don't think of these things because "four pages, good; two Kindles, bad!".
As far as your example though: A dead-tree book is sold...but if it wasn't the store's to sell, then there would be issues just like there were for the Kindle files you mentioned (the publisher had no right to issue those e-books as they didn't have the rights to them and Amazon didn't know it shouldn't have sold those files....completely different problem from DRM, actually). So, a dead-tree book probably wouldn't have been *published* if its rights weren't correctly obtained (and so you wouldn't have been able to buy it in the first place in a truly analogous situation to the one you mention). And all Amazon did was to rectify this error rather than leave itself exposed to a ton of civil litigation for selling a book it had no right to sell because the publisher screwed up.
Forget the files ( though
Forget the files ( though most people I've heard say paper is longer lived) how about the kindles they are buying? What's the shelf life on those as they are shifted between countless teenage hands? Paper books don't need replacing every two years.
One other thing about the
One other thing about the Kindle -
at least for me, it really HURTS reading anything on a screen for an extended period of time. Whenever I have any readings for class that are online, I always wind up printing them out. Eyestrain's already a problem when people spend too much time at computers, this isn't going to help much.
eyestrain
I've wondered if, as today's youngsters (who need to get offa my lawn) grow up staring at computer screens far more than I did, they will have less trouble with eyestrain from said screens than people my age and older.
As far as paper books go, I really like being quickly able to flip through and find a favorite part, and I can do that based on approximately where in the book I remember it being. I don't think I can do that with a Kindle. There's also something about the size and layout of various books that will be lost in digital media, and there's the physical representation of how far you've gotten in a book based on the number of pages done and the number left to go that just isn't as meaningful to me as numbers on a screen as it is when I look at where my bookmark is.
But I'm getting old and cranky, and did I mention getting offa my lawn?
Oh, wait until the millennials turn 40
That's going to be interesting.
That's definitely a
That's definitely a possibility. I'm in my early 20s, but I didn't grow up on computers and didn't have the battery-powered toys with screens and video games and all that stuff, so that may be the reason that I can't handle staring at a screen for an extended period of time.
Then again, it'll also be interesting to see the social skill development of the kids who grow up in front of the computer as well.
books
I wonder if anyone ever found the $100 bill I was using as a bookmark while reading Chaucer.
Oh, well.
I agree with the screed, BUT ...
she didn't read the Globe article carefully enough. Cushing Academy is not "a private school in Boston". It is a private school in rural Ashburnham, 55 miles west of Boston, much too far away to be considered any sort of suburb.
Not mentioned by anyone so far: they spent $12,000 on a coffee maker but can't afford paper books anymore?
Affordability?
Did you read it carefully enough? It's not that they can't afford paper books any more. It's that they don't have unlimited space to house them all and will be able to extend their library while also embracing new technology at the same time.
truth be told,
they are just trying to enhance their "brand". New England towns are littered with defunct prep schools that discovered too late that there is Andover/Exeter/St.Grottlesex and everyone else. (E.g., Abbott Academy, Northampton School, et al).This is not just my opinion.
http://www.prepreview.com/school/Cushing_Academy.html
Prep schools have to justify their existence at a time when it is getting increasingly-difficult for town meetings to say no to school departments. (The kids that attend these schools are from suburban backgrounds, by and large. Yes there are urban kids on scholarship, exceptions that prove the rule).Public schools in towns like Duxbury and Wellesley have become de facto prep schools; tough competition for places like Cushing that are fighting for their survival. Believe me, if bonding capability/contributions allowed it, they would break ground on new buildings/libraries in a heartbeat. It's about the money.