Let us now praise public libraries

I am passionate supporter of public education and public libraries. Coming from a small, poor farm in a small, rural town in a rural state, I would have had NO chance to go to a good college, a good grad school, work as a diplomat and end up as a professor at a top university without them.

Much as I love Brazil, having spent over five years there off and on, every time I get off the plane there, I am reminded that if I had been born in similar circumstances in a similar place in Brazil, I would still be there. I would not have had the crucial structural supports that enabled me to get pretty solid beginnings of an education, learn about what was possible in the world, and make some fairly informed choices about what I wanted to try to do. My parents helped enormously. My Dad, in particular, clearly assumed that I was going to go to college and did some fairly clever things to help me get there (more on that in another post). But they had limited time and resources, and what helped me to take advantage of their good will and urgings about education was precisely public schools and libraries.

School was necessary but not sufficient. There was no kindergarten, so I started to learn to read in the first grade. I was lucky my first couple of teachers did a solid phonics approach, so I was doing OK by third grade, age nine or so.

My elementary school had a very small library, which mostly had a lot of donated hand-me-downs. Not even classics like the Winnie-the-Pooh books. But it had Dr. Seuss and a lot of older kids books, so once I had run through what we had around home, I worked my way through it.

By about nine, I plucked up my courage and went to the high school library, which sort of doubled as a public lending library on a limited basis, at least for school kids. You can see it here in back of this picture of the student council of my senior year, 1969.

They let me start checking out their books. I discovered more young adult books, like sci fi classics by Robert Heinlein, and books like Drums along the Mohawk. And other historical fiction, particularly about other countries. I was already pretty curious about other places and times, and I absolutely ate up historical fiction of almost all kinds. I started looking at history books and a variety of magazines, like reading Newsweek on and off, when something caught my eye, or things like American Heritage, which fanned my interest in history.

When I was using the Kuna High School Library as a public library, the whole town had fewer than 600 people. It now has over 10,000 and has a nice but small public library, located sort of near the old high school. Here is a picture of it. I am glad that the town has followed through to do that.

In my day (I'm thinking about 1960 in this case) things were quite a bit more limited, so I worked my way through the high school fiction section in a couple of years. One advantage of living on a farm with relatively few other kids around, day to day, was that I read all the time. My parents encouraged that. My Dad would often let me out of farm work, if I had my nose in a book and he did not need me that badly.

My next step was the real live public library in the larger town, Nampa, about ten miles away. By the time I was twelve or so, I would ride my trusty Schwinn one-speed bicycle to Nampa, to see my nephews Andy and Dan, who were about my age and among my best buddies, maybe go to the movies, and most often go to the library. My parents would usually go to town once a week or so, too, and they were also pretty willing to take me to the library. You can see the outline of the building in this logo I found online.

It was heavenly. A lot more novels, historical, sci fi, adventures, etc. Beyond just working my way through the shelves, I even started cautiously trying to look up specific books that I had seen glancing references to, that sounded interesting. When I was about fourteen, it took me six months or so to figure out enough bibliographical information to find Catch-22, which I had seen a vague reference to that had sounded intriguing. It was a bit over my head at first, but it is good to be pushed by books. About the same time, I found The Lord of the Rings, first in the library and then in paperbacks, which I was beginning to be willing to spend my own money on.

The important point, though, is that given even a minimally adequate public school, which at least teaches you to read reasonably well, the public library can open many doors through books, magazines, histories (and now in a modern library, videos, music, even computers and games). You can begin to educate yourself, in effect.

So I am absolutely delighted that my daughter Julia went to UT's library school, just got her Masters in Library Science, and is now working as a librarian full time in Cedar Park, just north of Austin. As you can see, their library is a bit nicer and more modern. But even a really basic library, like the ones I started with, can be the beginning of a person's intellectual expansion and social mobility.

So I have very little patience with people who are not willing to spend a bit of tax money on decent public schools and libraries. People like that are in effect keeping people like me down on the farm, when maybe they would be a lot happier and more productive to society elsewhere.