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TheNightmareOfHair t1_je0mrmd wrote

Speaking of internet rage bait...

This "only 7" stat seems to be about how many schools have certified librarians -- not the number of schools that have libraries.

Couple of things about that:

  • Libraries seem to be under-invested in, and some schools don't have them. Agreed.
  • I don't know the number of schools with libraries. It probably depends a lot on how you define a library, but I would bet a bunch of money that if you use a normal-person definition like "a dedicated area with a sufficient number of books and a borrowing system," then the number is much higher than 7.
  • I was never clear on what our school librarians did, and I'm still not. Did they need a certification to keep the shelves stocked, answer questions, and recommend books? Are students even coming to school librarians to ask questions or ask for book recommendations these days?
  • Stop the internet rage bait, please, or at least the irony of calling out internet rage bait in an internet rage bait post.
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BlackWidowLooks t1_je15dyp wrote

School librarians, specifically, are teachers of a kind (in PA and many other states the job requires a teaching license as well and a Library Science Degree.) During school library time students don't just get books and read. They have their reading skills evaluated by a dedicated professional, they get specific instruction in reading skills that greatly supplements what and overworked teacher can provide and is more focused on reading for pleasure than textual required reading, and most importantly for me, they teach research and information resource evaluation; the skills we need to, say, "do our own research on the vaccine," and not come away with some Q Anon garbage.

It's no accident that insufficient school funding policies over the last 40-50 years leading to a lack of school librarians, happening at the same time as a boom in technology changing how we get information faster than we can keep up, has lead to the exact situation we are in, where kids on Tik Tok think birds are a psyop and a not insignificant part of our nation's population believes the big election lie.

When I was a kid in public school our librarian taught us boolean operators. Now, I work with kids and even having grown up with google their whole lives they can often barely figure out the best way to get the information they are looking for because no one is teaching them.

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