The Death of Libraries?
- Image via Wikipedia
The Philadelphia Free Library System is closing its doors.
As a bibliophile and great lover of libraries, this saddens me a great deal. Libraries have always provided for me a place of refuge and sanctuary, where I can go and quiet my mind and feel at peace. As fast as I tend to fly through books, the library also offers me an alternative to what would be a huge expense.
It also provides what in some cases can be the only access that the extremely poor can have to books and information. Libraries are an invaluable educational resource, and should not be looked on as an optional service to the people any more than the right to a public education.
But in the recession, education is one of the areas where the most suffering seems to be occurring. Teacher layoffs, school consolidations, class sizes growing. Educational resources, be it schools or libraries, should be the last cost-cutting option, instead it’s seemed to be the first place that cuts have been made.
Without education, there is no hope that in the future we may be able to pull ourselves out of this monetary hole we’ve found ourselves in. Education is the foundation stone of success, and without a quality education, be it of an academic or vocational sort, there is no hope that any person can succeed, much less bring themselves out of poverty.
Libraries, and the books contained therein, are a place where children can learn not to resent being forced to read, but to look on reading as a fulfilling activity. Libraries tend to be a center of historical and genealogical records for local areas, records that are not available online or via any other resource.
Even were all of the information contained in libraries freely available over the internet, that information would not be accessible by a significant portion of the population who still cannot afford computers, much less a monthly internet fee. For those people, libraries were also the only place where they could freely access those electronic resources.
By closing the door of a library, much less the entire library system for a large city such as Philadelphia, you close the door to knowledge for a significant portion of the population, and by doing so, you weaken the population as a whole.
Were Ben Franklin alive to see this, he would be weeping.
Related articles by Zemanta
- Philadelphia To Close Public Libraries – All Of Them – October 2nd [Libraries] (consumerist.com)
- Philadelphia Free Library System is shutting down (boingboing.net)
Recent Comments