The Erosion of Common Ground

A hive of intellectual curiosity and pursuit. That was my impression as I looked up from the new Alexander McCall Smith novel I was sampling in the New Books section of our public library. Before me, spread throughout the spacious, well-appointed library, were patrons of all ages, even college students in spite of the fact that the university nearby has several extensive libraries as well. The public library is a citizens’ space: common ground for the common good. Ours is heavily patronized by readers young and old across the economic strata. Yes, a number of homeless individuals take shelter there, reading the day away or using the pubic computers, avoiding the bitter chill of the Indiana winter. Why should they not? They are as entitled to the pursuit of knowledge or the pleasure of a good read as anyone.

Although the Digital Revolution has brought about changes in how we can engage in literate pursuits, those changes—the Internet, ebooks—have provided new options, rather than substitutes for volumes on shelves. I will gladly confess that in the course of writing five or six books since 2000, I have not darkened the door of traditional library to do the research necessary for them. The Internet has provided me with access to libraries, collections, and various media worldwide. But that does not mean that I consider traditional libraries obsolete. Far from it. Public libraries offer both traditional resources and access to digital resources, especially for those who don’t have computer media ready to hand. The emerging Digital Age is enlarging the role of public libraries, not reducing it.

That is not what those heavily invested in the Industrial/Corporate Age would have us believe. Corporate oligarchs are grasping at every possible means to extend the Corporate Age past its sell-by date, which was about the turn of the century. Much of this grasping is taking the form of attacking common ground: public places, spaces, and endeavors whose democratic mission is to foster and support the common good. The graspers are largely conservative, though not exclusively, and focused on elitist privilege, often corporate. The Digital Age is increasingly about individuation and diverse community, not about corporate personhood.

Public libraries, public schools, public—read “democratic”—anything is suspect in the eyes of corporate oligarchy, in which monied elites are focused on controlled parochialism. Gerrymandering electoral districts to ensure that candidates backed by corporate money win offices and become puppet legislators; undermining public confidence in public schools by unfounded criticism, underfunding, and the shunting of public money into corporate pockets through contracts for ever more testing, vouchers, and charter schools; widening the wealth gap between rich and poor through regressive taxes and tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy—all of these are the self-serving actions of those heavily invested in a dying age, the Industrial/Corporate Age.

The Digital Age, sparked by two key Digital Revolution developments, the computer and the Internet, is not an extension of the Industrial/Corporate Age. It is a revolution-worthy new era. Too many people already understand this. Maybe they read newspapers or see the information on Facebook. Maybe they come to the public library. However, they gain their understanding of the radical changes that are marking out a new cultural era, it’s scaring the bejezus out of conservatives hoping to preserve the dying Industrial/Corporate age. But beware. Those who are afraid are always dangerous. Those of us ready to embrace the Digital Age would do well to remember Gandhi’s words: “The enemy is fear. We think it is hate; but, it is fear.”

*This essay is cross-posted on two blogs: Advancing Learning and Democracy (http://advancinglearning.blogspot.com) and Arts in View (http://artsinview.blogspot.com).

Internet Limits Also Limit Learning

Two controversies converge around the issue of access to the Internet, our Information Highway. One involves filtering Internet content in the name of protecting children from the highway’s seamier byways, which has resulted in large measure from the decade-old Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA). The second hinges on current debates about so-called net neutrality, or the maintenance of equality of access and treatment of data on the Internet, something that some would like to abandon in favor of privileging certain users who can afford to use the fast lane, relegating the bulk of users to the slow lane.

An alarming number of policy makers and school officials are advocating the elimination of school librarians, something so patently short-sighted and ill-advised that it seems incredulous to thinking parents and educators. In the Digital Age the concept of “library” has expanded exponentially. Libraries have never been static repositories, whether of clay tablets, scrolls, printed books, or digital files; and librarians are more essential than ever before in history to order, select, advise, guide, and teach relative to these multimodal resources.

And so it is fitting that the American Library Association in its recent report, Fencing Out Knowledge: Impact of the Children’s Internet Protection Act 10 Years Later (from http://www.ala.org) finds that “over-filtering,” as a result of CIPA, limits legitimate access to educational resources and, according to ALA President Barbara Stripling, “consequently reduces access to information and learning opportunities for students.” This is all the more worrying in light of two current trends, namely, 1) the aforementioned elimination of librarians, who are information-savvy folk prepared to guide the young and uninitiated along the Information Highway and its many byways, and 2) the vast amount of resources now available, sometimes exclusively, on the Internet that cannot be captured or replicated in physical, books-on-shelves libraries, librarians or none.

Education is about access to information, and a too-vigorous attempt to “protect” learners blunts learning. That’s the bottom line.

But it leads naturally to the second controversy. Net neutrality is related to the “common carrier” concept, which in common law countries refers to persons or companies that transport goods or people for the benefit of the general public, in contrast to “contract carriers,” which transport only for certain clients and can refuse transport for others. Recently, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has been considering new rules that would permit Internet service providers to use faster lanes of data transmission to favor certain users, namely wealthy corporations.

Blocking or limiting access to Internet content is anathema to education for the common good. Commodifying access by privileging wealthy corporations at the expense of rendering everyone else second class risks substantial educational harm to institutions and individuals and upends the democratic ideals of equity and equality regardless of socioeconomic status and other potentially discriminatory factors.

Digital Age Competencies: Focusing and Sharing

Tom has red paint. Mary has blue paint. Neither can make purple paint unless both share their colors. Keep this notion in mind for a moment.

Much has been written about information overload. It is perhaps the most significant problem of the Digital Age. There’s simply too much information to deal with it all effectively. Consequently, an essential real-world skill that educators must learn, apply to their own work, and teach their students is how to focus attention on information that matters. Just as teachers once taught students how to use the tables of contents, indexes, and glossaries of their textbooks, today’s educators need to teach students how to use abstracts, summaries, keywords, and Internet search strategies to pinpoint information they need to find and use.

This Digital Age competency—focusing—is largely common knowledge. Less common is its counterpart: sharing. Focusing strategies tend to narrow the field of intellectual vision. As a result, information can be isolated and disconnected. Tom’s red paint, Mary’s blue. Bits-and-pieces information does not constitute knowledge acquisition that leads to deep, real-world understanding. This is like the problem teachers often cite of the student who writes well in English class but cannot seem to construct a coherent sentence for a math problem in algebra class or, conversely, the student who is good at math but cannot seem to apply mathematics in the context of a physics or chemistry class. Connections do not necessarily come naturally.

The counterpart to teaching focusing strategies is teaching sharing strategies, such as exchanging information, cooperating, and collaborating. In the Digital Age workplace—now, not in some misty future—success usually depends on teamwork. Tom and Mary need to be taught that if they share their colors, they can make a new color. This realization contradicts our American spirit of rugged independence, which has permeated school culture, but the necessity of focusing and sharing is a Digital Age reality. Education needs to shift into this mode of focusing and sharing if we are serious about preparing our young people for life in this century, rather than the past.

Standardized testing, which is fraught with problems in any case, is particularly problematic from the standpoint of focusing and sharing because most such testing proceeds from a mindset of rugged independence. Most standardized testing ought to be abandoned simply on grounds that it is outmoded and, as a result of its pervasiveness and its past-century modus operandi, is holding back educational progress toward teaching and learning this century’s Digital Age competencies.

Greed Capitalism, Civil Democracy, and Public Education

Extreme polarization in American politics has become the norm, and it’s wreaking havoc on public education.

The old labels of conservative and liberal must be set aside. “Conservatives” are intent on conserving nothing. These so-called conservatives—at least the most ardent of the tribe—are actively working toward resegregation of U.S. society not only along racial and ethnic lines but also along economic lines. The destruction of public education is one way they are trying to achieve it. This objective can best be characterized as an iteration of greed capitalism. The philosophy is not “I’ve got mine, you get yours” but rather, “I’ve got mine and now I want yours.”

Greed capitalism is rooted in fear, and there’s been plenty of that to go around. Although the 1990s brought nearly a decade of growth and prosperity, that happy time was disturbed as the world moved with mythic anxiety toward the turn of the century. Y2K was a boogeyman. Much of his boogeyness was steeped in a deep distrust of technology. The Digital Age didn’t arrive like the rosy-fingered dawn. It raced in with bells, sirens, and flashing lights. If you were content to live in some prior misremembered Golden Age, say, the Fifties, such a clamor represented a threat that, for all its subsequent banality, seemed all too real to many people at the time. New technology then and still today raises the fear of change.

And then, of course, there was the all-too-real assault on U.S. sovereignty of the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Given a political hysteria already stoked by other forms of fear, it was no surprise that overreaction was the order of the day. Two ill-considered, illegal, and largely unnecessary wars torpedoed prosperity and plunged the country into massive debt, while policies favoring greed capitalism set America up for the economic knockdown of 2008, just when the country ought to have been recovering from its excess of imperialism.

So-called liberals experienced a fleeting resurgence in Barack Obama’s politics of hope, which were a reaction to the then-dominant politics of fear. But the 21st century’s not-so-great depression put some holes in hope, and the election—and reelection—of a black-identified President, of course, fueled the poorly concealed racism inherent in greed capitalism.

Today’s liberals would have been middle-of-the-road conservatives in those golden Fifties. A virulently radical rightwing cadre under the big tent of putative conservatism has dragged the entire body politic to the right. If there are any ardent leftists remaining, they are plowing their organic fields well away from the fray. If true, honest-to-Eisenhower conservatism has been subverted by the radicalism of greed, then true FDR liberalism has been subverted by apathy and, ironically, a reemergent sense of hopelessness.

The American Founders, by and large, well understood the dangers of absolute democracy, such as strict adherence to majority rule. A tyranny of the majority has always been a real threat. Democracy in the New World could succeed only on the basis of a social contract: government for the common good. Of the people, by the people, for the people—accent on for. This is the essence of our civil democracy—not socialism, as rightwing critics accuse.

A cornerstone of the common good has been, since near the beginning of our nationhood, public education. Truly public education is premised on notions of equity and equality. The common school is a reification of the common good, providing everyone the opportunity to achieve success and prosperity to the extent of his or her abilities and efforts. In attending to the common good, the Founders were focused on the notion often expressed in the cliché about a rising tide lifting all boats. When all prosper, the nation prospers. When prosperity is privileged, the nation falters.

Rightists give a wink and a nod to “democracy,” “Christianity,” and other wholesome notions and, in so doing, have hoodwinked a substantial segment of the population into believing that what’s good for the rich is good for everyone. Gold-enthroned televangelists have nothing on these purveyors of the greed-is-good philosophy, for whom there is no common good. Common is for commoners. Greed capitalists are creating an aristocracy of wealth. In 21st century American politics money rules wherever good people have been fooled into voting against their own best interests, something you'll never catch a greed capitalist doing.

So where does that put public schools? Smack in the middle. They are the red flag at the center of the rope in the socioeconomic and political tug of war, pulled this way and that. Adherents of the Founders’ vision of democracy tempered by social conscience are fighting to retain public education as the means by which the American dream can be realistically offered to everyone—no exceptions.

Greed capitalists and their dupes are pulling hard in the opposite direction, using vouchers, charters, and “choice” sound-good rhetoric (and accompanying legislation) to ensure a permanent, and growing, economic underclass—serfs for the aristocracy. The gulf between the wealthy and the impoverished in the United States is astonishingly large in comparison to other nations in the developed world. America has now become a shining example not of democracy realized, but of democracy imperiled.

Those who believe in the American Founders’ vision of a social contract, of the common good, of a land of opportunity must grasp their end of the rope and tug with increased fervor. Make no mistake, the opportunists of greed are doing just that from the opposite direction. The battle to keep universal public education public is a battle to save American democracy.

School Librarians Under Attack

Under what scenario have school librarians now become disposable? Used to be—and still ought to be—the school library was the heart of the school, often literally positioned at the architectural center of the school building. Just as our nation's public libraries have been a democratizing essential of civic life by giving free access to knowledge regardless of socioeconomic status, so, too, our public school libraries have been vital in extending equal access to learning to students from all backgrounds.

So, is the attack on school librarians part of the corporatizing of public schools? If public schools can be further undermined by eliminating some professional educators—which is what librarians are—then will it be even easier to condemn the public schools and widen the gap between monied education "haves" and the impoverished education "have-nots"?  Pretty slick. Mischaracterize librarians as mere shushers and book-shelvers, and it's easy to advocate replacing them with lower-cost nonprofessionals.

Why bother? Why not just get rid of libraries altogether? Oh, wait! That's already happening. After all, everything in books can now be found on the Internet. Schools are beginning to transition away from bricks and mortar—or volumes and shelves, in this case—to virtual libraries. Is that why some policy makers and short-sighted school people think we don't need librarians, simply because the form of library resources is in transition?

Let's think about that. I'm sure there was hand-wringing when papyrus and parchment replaced all those tidy clay tablets, and then the scroll lovers probably wept when codex came into vogue. Well, now codex may be giving some ground to digital. None of those transitions eliminated the need for librarians. In fact, precisely the opposite is a more logical conclusion. In the uncertain territory of Digital Age libraries, "collections" stretch the very definition of that word, and professional librarians are more necessary than ever.

School librarians today are called on to undertake all of the traditional professional responsibilities attached to that career and to add a few new ones, such as vetting digital resources. They are certainly not merely shelvers and shushers. They are digital curators, a role that is vitally important if students and teachers are to take full advantage of the vast educational resources now available in true Digital Age schooling. 

As Joyce Kasman Valenza notes in School Library Monthly, "Librarians are uniquely qualified to curate. School librarians are perhaps most ripe for this function, because they understand the curriculum and the specific needs and interests of their own communities of teachers, administrators, learners, and parents." Seems as though that's an excellent reason to keep and to nurture school librarians, not get rid of them.

Critics act as though librarians are artifacts of the past. Nothing could be further from the truth. School librarians are architects of the future.