One policy stuck out as still important today from Lepore’s 2008 article Lepore’s quotes Anne Carroll Moore, superintendent of the New York Public library’s department of Work with Children, starting in 1902. “Do not expect or demand perfect quiet.” (Lepore 2008) This is still true in all the libraries I know (except in area that say silent area).
And as for principles the principle that a child’s learning begins in the shelves of a library is very true to this day. (Leopore, 2008) I myself am a great example I still learn tons fro books I find and read from my public library.
On a personal note, no matter what reservations and hesitations I might personally have about a third grader reading the Hunger Games Series, and what that says about the violence that is prevalent in much of today’s literature, even for the rather impressionable third graders, freedom is what America and democracy are all about. No matter if I think that exposing third graders to Kids killing kids for any reason, is hard to justify. Exposure to what would have been seen as “sinful” or unwholesome, things we do not agree with, and aspects of human nature that make up the “darker” sides of human imagination can be clearly justified in the name of intellectual and other freedoms that make up any authentic, or honest democracy.
The idea of the libraries role in enforcing moral standards is a broken antique ideal of our past, kids these days make their own rules, or so has been my experience as a bookseller the past seven months. Ignoring parental mandates, and reading far beyond grade level in terms of content, words on a page as well as style.
An important part of our cultural evolution of our library/literate society in the United States is articulated pretty well in Lepore’s 2008 article the need for thought. Leopore’ quotes Katherine White “Public libraries have more and more seemed to me a democratic necessity,” (Leopore, 2008) to be a democratic necessity there must be freedoms of thought, and free curiosity.
To add to the democratic imperative of freedom, no one can fully protect their kids from unwholesome literature or other media, unless we deprive them of opportunities for self-discovery, and withhold freedoms from our kids especially at their local bookstores, and their public libraries, and increasingly on the internet.
I was surprised by Stearn’s quote of Dr. Poole of Chicago tells a truth that has remained a constant reality for public librarians. “The young people are our (public librarians) best friends and they serve the interests of the library by enlisting for it the sympathies of their parents who are often too busy to read.” (Stearns, 1894) This experience is still true today I can see this clearly in my job as a bookseller at Linden Tree books in Los Altos.
Libraries can and do play a cricual role in the devoelopment of children, but it is has become a liberating role, not a Pigeon holing or an authoritarian role as it once was.
Lepore, J. (2008). The lion and the mouse: The battle that reshaped children's literature. The New Yorker. Retrieved January 20, 2012 from http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/07/21/080721fa_fact_lepore.
Stearns, L.E. (1894). Report on reading for the young. Papers and Proceedings of the General Meeting of the American Library Association (16): 81-87.
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