Chapter Three

At one point in my career I undertook a detailed study of print utilization in several school libraries. What it revealed was that our book and audiovisual circulation, class visits, and student casual use was about average, a disappointment given that the library had been conceived as the soul of the comprehensive schools. It was little consolation to know that our third of the functionally illiterate were better off than the average third, or that of those whose performance in communication at university was adequate, many had learned in spite of the system, not because of it. No doubt we had taken the traditional library as far as it could go, but there had been no revolution.

Teachers who could be persuaded to use the new materials did so at least as much as the cap created by the traditional textbook framework allowed, but those who chose to ignore print and AV materials beyond their textbook could do so. It is important to perceive why an advance beyond the textbook, except for illustration and rounding out, cannot be taken for granted, since a failure to advance beyond token use of library resources may be one of the earliest symptoms of a failure to admit the existence of functional illiteracy, at least in a form which would force schools to focus on it.

It is not the first preoccupation of the beginner to demonstrate her awareness of the library’s potential. She will be too busy putting courses together and shoring up the neophyte’s relatively thinner background in subject matter. In doing so, however, the teacher will be conscious that the first priority in becoming a permanent member of the staff will not be subject mastery, or the degree of library "enrichment", but the avoidance of discipline problems. The typical response is to shut out outside influence and scrutiny until some level of confident autonomy is established. Even when that point is reached, the tendency will be to maintain the course skeleton so painstakingly built up, and to add on library resources to the extent that they supplement the textbook and maintain the level of accommodation with the students. It is a notoriously neglected fact that a satisfactory accommodation is often reached before a habit of library use is developed.

Teachers will tend to preserve their autonomy, and thus a species of relative invisibility, first by making whatever writing assignments they ask of students depend on in-class materials. The emphasis may fall on character sketches based on assigned classroom readings, or on descriptive paragraphs, which are thought to encourage the use of the students own verbal resources. Posters, dioramas and speaking activities, much touted now as promoting self-realization through group interaction, are not without merit either, but may also complement the urge to anonymity and the avoidance of always unwelcome outside scrutiny. All this without factoring in the claims of the teacher’s own ego.

Thus any bid from the librarian, be he ever so accommodating and friendly, will have to succeed in the face of a substantial inertia, which, even if it does not blunt the use of library resources altogether, will at least place a cap on it. For one thing. factoring in additional resources can mean an additional period of extra work as well as allowing someone else a glimpse of what one is doing. For that reason, teachers tend to want to remain in control of a stable situation, which means that, at the end of the day, they, and not the librarian, will insist on the final say on the extent of library use. It simply won’t do to present library materials as essential to coping with functional illiteracy, since that risks making the teacher partly responsible for the failure to use them.

If using the library is the "in thing", teachers may feel obliged to make at least a minimal response, even if they are only gambling that this will strengthen their situation. But they will normally try to preserve their autonomy, and thus the capacity to regulate changes, by finding some way of using the library without using the librarian. Some of the cruder methods of doing this will be familiar to any librarian. I will refer to some of them for illustration, since the reserve which separates administrators, teachers, librarians and others comes even between friends, and places a damper or cap on what individuals in the organization are willing to attempt.

The point of trying to use the library but not the librarian is to limit the ability of outsiders to modify what the teacher is doing, and the failure to make a distinction between searching and researching in using library resources is easily the first symptom of a dysfunctional approach to print and non-print resources. The failure to distinguish between searching and researching allows a transfer to the teacher and student of an operation which should require significant input from a librarian. Teachers will accept assistance in searching, but accepting assistance in researching requires the surrender of enough autonomy to allow the librarian a formative role.

Searching is less threatening, since it is something Keepers of Books are expected to be good at on short notice. More importantly, it is something students can be asked to do one their own, thus avoiding compromising valued autonomy by limiting the librarian to removing merely mechanical obstacles. In order to do research, on the other hand, the student must be conscious of exactly what he is searching for in order to ask the right questions, and this requires assistance from someone who understands the assignment, and knows what resources are available and relevant. There are limits, however, to just how much outside input teachers will welcome.

Some teacher reserve in allowing a librarian to influence researching arises out of vanity and a reluctance to admit that someone else may have a better handle on how to design a project. For this reason it is particularly difficult for knowledgeable librarians to avoid intimidating younger teachers, who learn the price of failing to keep up their end of the Compact long before they come to appreciate the value of the library’s role. Behind this fear is the deeper fear of Blame, particularly in the matter of literacy. Let us first look at manoeuvres which convey crude signals to a librarian that there may be more than poor planning behind a carelessly structured library visit.

The first elementary manoeuvre is the Pearl Harbor Assignment. As its name implies, it indicates a class that bursts into the library by surprise minutes after the beginning of a period, followed by a teacher (most commonly a greenhorn, the veterans having already found it wiser to avoid rousing up the librarian in so crude a fashion). The teacher is quick to assure the librarian either that the students are only browsing, and therefore need no assistance (in fact, an informally classified and annotated reading list works wonders even in these circumstances); or he will announce that his 35 charges are looking for material on humour in Swift, but he prefers that they "find it for themselves".

Either ploy is intended to forestall the librarian’s involvement, either because the teacher does not want an outsider "telling him what he can or cannot do", or to forestall the possibility that the assignment will be discovered to be a slipshod arrangement tossed together at the last moment. Since the librarian is only a peripheral member at best of the Office Mafia, there is no guarantee that he will not try to alter the assignment, specifically by pointing out that there is no way that so many students can be squeezed into such a narrow topic.

It is only then that the Pearl Harbor manoeuvre allows for a hurried last minute teacher-librarian consultation. However, the insistence that students "do their own research" is based on a typical misconception of what research is, and appears in many library visits, whether unannounced or not.

Confusing searching with researching is an interesting symptom of how the urge to survival central to the Compact works in isolating outsiders. Searching is simply what the students do when they arrive at the card catalogue or computer terminal and begin the process of accessing (in less pretentious days we would have said locating) material. Research proper begins only after the material is in hand, although, as we have observed, an adequate subject background, and clarity in research objectives, particularly the assignment’s thesis, has a bearing on what will be relevant to the searcher.

Research requires that sufficient information be assembled and digested to allow for the refining of a central thesis or unifying idea which will serve as a focus for gathering further data. Librarians and teachers cannot dump exclusive responsibility for a central thesis on the student, since students never ask for what they want, but rather for what they think they want. What they think they want depends on the thoroughness of advance preparation, an appreciation of whatever student performance the teacher expects, student intelligence, clarity in defining a topic and the extent of background knowledge. If the student does not know what the significant questions in a topic are, he will need more assistance. It is educational malpractice to allow students to begin a search for information with only such generalities as "Reformation", "French Revolution" or "Fur Trade".

But the research requirements are more complicated than even this account suggests. Information comes in many forms: in books, pamphlets, film, magazine articles, reference texts and computer data-banks. Generally only the librarian knows all that is available, but what she provides to the student will additionally require an awareness of what the teacher expects the student to produce. A paragraph, an essay, a group discussion or research paper all make different demands, and may make some information sources more appropriate than others.

Newspaper or magazine articles may be needed, or a research paper may have to be located through an Index. Sometimes a difficult college level text may have an introduction suitable for brighter high school students. Collecting authors, titles and subjects in a searching operation will not reveal the innards of the material or its level of difficulty, nor will it compensate if the assignment and the material are mismatched because of lack of prior consultation. Much of the information needed will be in the librarian’s head, and not all of it can loaded into computers.

The relevance of any information format will depend on whether the assignment is written or verbal, Individual or group. The librarian must also make some judgment on what the individual is capable of absorbing, since more difficult material may be useable by some students, but not others, and in large group assignments this distinction is important.

In short, what the student is told to find, and what she will eventually end up with, is a function of several variables, but most teachers tend to undertake research without fully accepting a need to rely on the librarian as a gateway to the collection. The urge to protect turf, and a sense of insecurity, will be the first obstacles to cooperation. However unsatisfactory it may be for either teacher or librarian to function apart, treating the librarian as a Keeper of Information is a way of limiting him to an essentially clerical function which will not threaten the teacher’s independence. The insecure may cling tenaciously to the belief that students or library technicians (who are lower in the pecking order) can find anything a librarian can—it only takes longer. Searching may then seem so intrinsically valuable that the librarian is best limited to facilitating an activity first shaped by teachers, free of interference from librarians, other teachers, and, above all, by administrators. The mechanisms which hold Mafias at bay have parallels for the library.

Many teachers, therefore, anticipate that the librarian will confine himself to acquiring materials and arranging them on the shelves, seemingly by occult means, since no matter what the assignment there may be a stubborn conviction that the student should find something on his own, although in the end the teacher is usually willing to accept anything provided the class is quiet and cooperative. (Shouting at a class to be quiet is a typical symptom of a poorly conceived assignment).

In practice the librarian usually has to settle for a loose approximation of cooperation, even if she is not faced with a Pearl Harbor attack. Teachers usually make the same assignments over a period of years, and many a decision on the nature of future library acquisitions is made after a class visit. Lasting harm can be limited by making do, even if the initial visits leave much to be desired, and so patience on the part of the librarian may improve some long term outcomes.

The best outcome was to persuade the teacher to allow the librarian to modify the library visit, perhaps by suggesting a variety of simple sub-topics and a basic reading list to aid the students. Normally a class coming to my library would find carts with books, class sets of magazine articles, reading lists and AV equipment all waiting for them. It took a fair effort at times to get a teacher to see that time spent looking for materials is always better spent working on them. Allowing the library a significant role in structuring the class visit enabled students to get right down to work, and that was the point, for the teacher and librarian could then concentrate on those few students still having difficulty getting untracked. In twenty minutes all were hard at work, and quiet too, which is really what the teacher wanted all along. Only when students had got their minds around their topics could they usefully search for materials on their own. In the meantime, the organized teacher, by putting the librarian to work, can do what the insecure cannot: lighten her work load by using some library visiting time to mark exams and essays.

Included in materials awaiting the student would be class sets of magazine articles on topics so new that books on them had not yet appeared. I would typically try to anticipate a demand for particular magazine articles before it occurred to teachers and students to ask for them, since there was no point in stocking periodical indexes, training students to use them to

locate magazine articles, and then turning them aside because the library could not afford to stock many of the magazines containing whatever references they were able to locate. One could anticipate, for example, that eventually someone would be asking for materials on the Information Highway, the potential for terrorist groups to focus on North America, or the feasibility of relying on gambling casinos as a source of employment for Natives. This meant checking the indexes for likely titles, ordering them well in advance of demand through the local public library’s telex service, and duplicating for possible future use.

This process was done cheaply, although instant computer access to such materials would have been quicker and more convenient. Needless to say, amateurs or paraprofessionals, lacking a scholarly background or familiarity with the resource environment, will seldom undertake this sort of advance preparation on their own. By the time the high school public bursts through the library doors and swarms about the computer terminals and loan desks it will be too late, and a librarian will meet resistance if she tries to disabuse amateurs of the tendency to assume that simply punching requests into computers, or sorting through card catalogues, will somehow, as if by magic, uncover something usable. Usable resources are not put together by clerically-minded Keepers of Books, whether they be librarians or amateurs hired to do duty in lieu of more expensive professionals.

It was always difficult to understand why teachers, with only three or four hours a semester to spare for library visits, so often wanted to waste most of their student’s time making a fetish out of independent student use of card catalogues or computer terminals to locate references too many of which were either irrelevant, unavailable, available only in insufficient quantities, or meaningless to those with shallow backgrounds. The insistence that students should be expected to be find things on their own is always presented in the guise of promoting individual responsibility and skills, but in fact frequently masks a busywork assignment where confining research to students is intended to hide the shortcomings of the assignment from unwelcome eyes.

The Pearl Harbor assignment is only one of a number of ways an inexperienced teacher will try to limit the librarian. Sometimes a teacher will bring a class to the library and leave for a coffee while the librarian supervises a simple searching operation. Classes may even arrive unaccompanied. One teacher liked to keep some adult students back for personal instruction, and dispatched the remainder to the library with a study assignment, a transparent attempt to improve the pupil-teacher ratio at the expense of the library. Whatever the method, the message is that the librarian is not expected to interfere. However, since these tactics are normally considered obvious abuses, they are more easily countered than other, more subtle, means of avoiding the librarian.

The desire to preserve turf is universal, and obviously not confined to public schools. But librarians are especially vulnerable to turf poaching, since they are handicapped, as already noted, in any controversy about boundaries. The librarian is always junior to the Mafia, and outnumbered by staff departments. It is always easier for administrators to make peace by expecting the librarian to back off.

The key precondition of the relevance of library resources is the existence of a secure base of communications instruction, yet at the outset allowing the librarian to effectively influence the appropriate classroom practices would be seen as a gross violation of the classroom teacher’s professional freedom. As a resource person a librarian should be able to advise teachers on the nature of writing programs in particular, or on methods to encourage greater use of AV, but this is precisely what the Compact exists to limit. The Compact is meant to keep outsiders at arm’s length, and the librarian is simply a species of outsider of the worst sort: a fellow professional who may see through what is or what is not being done in the classroom. A teacher may indeed be a believer in library resources, but only if this "religion" is compatible with his perception of professional freedom. To take library print resources seriously, however_, is to take functional illiteracy seriously, and thus organizational accountability seriously. Professionals seem instinctively ready to go to almost any length of avoid exposing themselves to such responsibility, and the effect of educational organization is to reinforce this reluctance.

Most teachers will give at least some advance warning of a library visit, but will still insist on students doing their own "research" in a general area: Elizabethan English, for example. This at least allows the librarian to do some agile advance footwork of his own, knowing the range and location of material the students will want and the kinds of questions they will have to ask. He will also know what they will/will not find, and what they can/can not use. After the classes have arrived and been herded to the card catalogue or computer terminals, it is a matter of waiting until the more intelligent students turn to the librarian in frustration. In this way, the neglected advance preparation will be improvised after the arrival of the class. Since the librarian is usually anxious to encourage class visits as a means of ensuring a visible level of library use, it may seem better to live with such practices in hopes of encouraging better organized assignments later.

One could wait a long time for an organized assignment even in the early 1970s. That was the heyday of the unstructured curriculum, the legacy of higher thinkers who had no difficulty persuading green and insecure teachers that lack of preparation could be a virtue. Some teachers liked library class visits, but only for the purpose of browsing, which allowed students to let the library atmosphere emanating from the shelves to seep into their souls without the teacher—and better yet, the librarian—having to lift a finger.

Not infrequently, the teacher felt that the process of spiritual elevation might wither if the student was required to produce anything so prosaic as an essay or book review, particularly if this meant a program of writing instruction which could only blight a creative spirit.

I once waited patiently for a number of browsing visits to elapse before deciding that the students were not literary cattle fattening up in such a leisurely fashion. I’m not sure whether the teacher even had an eventual assignment in mind; she may have felt that mere exposure to the presence of good books was an end in itself, one not to be spoiled by a pedantic insistence on the display of an interpretive writing capacity.

I suggested an assignment of some sort, although I can’t now remember just what it was. I had tried to be diplomatic (not my longest suit by that time) but she recoiled with the question, "Why does everything have to be organized? I believe in an unstructured approach!" By that time I had come to the conclusion that a complaint about over-organization was bound to

surface whenever there was a chance that something might have to be better organized, and so I made a rather impolite suggestion that her reading program hardly rated being called a program if it contained little beyond browsing.

She ended up in tears at the principal’s desk. He was a superb scholar and gentleman, and a person of great wisdom. He did suggest that I might be gentler, but he knew what the trouble was. Nonetheless, he made no attempt to make a firm move in the direction I wished to go, knowing no doubt of the potential hysteria in any departure from the Compact.

An apt example of what administrators are afraid to get involved in is the following: a young teacher, in the absence of a full-time librarian, undertook an introduction to library use on her own. She found a workbook, copied a class set of notes on bibliographies, footnotes, Dewey Decimal numbers, and so on, and also copied a corresponding quiz. Nothing in the exercise required the use of a single library item, but rather than do the exercise in the classroom, the teacher moved the class to tables in the library! Needless to say, no assignment was keyed to the exercise. Rather, the class was informed that if teachers in Social Studies gave a library assignment the pupils would now have an idea of what was required. Back at the ranch, most Social Studies teachers had made written assignments optional, offering such alternatives as posters and panel discussions instead, so that few if any students actually had to write anything. It was a classic example of the solitudes too many teachers spend their careers moving through.

We used to call this busywork, but don’t blame the young teacher. Blame all the professionals who are so anxious, in pursuit of security, to keep administrators, librarians, other teachers and assorted outsiders at arm’s length. Better yet, blame them for not recognizing that mediocrity is the price they pay for the professional freedom embedded in educational organization. Too many educators, down deep, are shallow.

The self-serving myopia of professionals makes outsiders of parents and school boards, too, educational public-relations notwithstanding. A parent is never farther from what is going in a child’s classroom than when he sits opposite the teacher’s desk in an interview. Sitting physically inside the classroom conveys little of what is going on there, and parents, no less than most administrators, would not know what to look for in any event. Yet the teacher is not being dishonest. The parent may even get a realistic view from some confident and capable professionals, but nothing in the interview prevents a less perceptive teacher from seeing her classroom with rose-coloured glasses, oblivious of what students are not learning. The Compact works best when it is invisible.

Classroom autonomy exacts a price even from teachers who still have a genuine concern for the teaching of writing, but whose approach invites plagiarism by avoiding the library-centered book review in favour of a research-type, in-class assignment. Teachers are forever trying to track down the copied passages which students lard into written assignments, especially research essays on novels studied in class. Administrators have sometimes felt compelled to remove from the library, in my absence, a common source of plagiarism: commercial notes such as those published by Coles and Barons.

It is an irony of classroom autonomy that the assignments whose integrity the teachers are seeking to protect by restricting library use originate in class, rather than in the library. For some years teachers have de-emphasized poetry and moved into the study of novels in an attempt to find some young adult selection which can be added to English department resources in hopes of reviving a flagging interest in literature. Where once a single novel was studied intensively as a text, followed by an extensive or external assignment on a library--based selection, now students are faced with two or more novels studied as texts during a semester, usually evaluated by character sketches or standardized book reports. The move away from the library often occurs imperceptibly, without the librarian being informed, since a library interest in such internal classroom matters as assigned readings would be just the kind of interference most resented by teachers.

Thus teachers tended to turn a way from library resources in their attempt to find a magic wand to capture the attention of their charges, but students continued to fake their way through book reports by plagiarizing professional notes obtained from bookstores. It is possible in this way for students to make it through English courses without ever reading an assigned selection. The trick is to let the teacher talk long enough to ensure that anything which can appear on a test has been covered.

Some years ago well-intentioned reformers discovered USSR, a silent period of some fifteen minutes or so at the beginning of class devoted to freely chosen student reading. It was a cornerstone in the unstructured approach: students would have fun; they would want to read. At first I naively expected a surge in library circulation as a result. Not so. Teachers began countering student evasions by forcing them to do the regular assigned reading in class. Those who completed the readings still did not have to use library materials, however, but could bring newspapers or magazines from home, or do homework, as a reward for their diligence or cooperation. And there are yet other practices which diminish use of the library.

Without involving librarians, teachers have often tried to limit plagiarism or faking by limiting the range of books the students have access to. Ironically, by limiting the choice to two to four popular young people's selections, they force themselves to acquire reserve collections in quantity, and find themselves limited to just the kind of popular selections most likely to attract the attention of Coles Notes. The solution to the problem is not to limit access to library resources but to structure the assignment to make Coles Notes or any other commentaries relevant and useful. As I will argue later, this is exactly what the in-class book review based on library resources can do--but going this route will necessitate exactly what English teachers are least inclined to do: focus on formal writing by using novels as a vehicle. This is how we can best travel the road to functional literacy, but advocacy from a librarian is sure to be resented as gross interference.

Only ten to twenty percent of students are natural readers. They will not be deterred by the writing schedule. Imaginatively handled, the book review format will at least expose the remainder of students to literature, and some will be favorably influenced by what they read, especially if teachers and librarians work together in ensuring that good young adult literature is available. The writing initiative will not worsen the general appeal of reading, or what has survived of it.

This beats a subtle side effect of teaching the novel as a textbook: a student who has been forced to grind through four assigned novels in a year is effectively noveled-out, and is highly unlikely to read further on his own. Guess who will be blamed when library circulation subsequently declines. Oh well, try another damned survey on what students want, or engage in a flurry of promotions designed to create the illusion of use in the library. That will at least take some of the pressure off the Mafia, who will be claim that everything possible with respect to reading, writing and literacy is being done, and that their school compares favourably with others in all national surveys.

Unless the essential base of a professional freedom grounded in classroom anonymity is reformed, there is no point in expecting real change, a point which will be fleshed out further in the chapter on teaching through audio-visual resources. Given the growing pool of jocks and/or other isolated, content-weak and inexperienced practitioners, it is worth repeating that the public should be highly skeptical of the new classroom order as seen by the avant-guard of reformers: teaching oriented around activities and themes, rather than the alleged dry divisions of traditional subjects (which so many don't understand anyway); progression from kindergarten to graduation at one's own pace, or anecdotal reports instead of grades. In the context of the educational Compact, these otherwise useful ideas are apt to do serve equally as red herrings to distract attention from the problem of literacy. There is no such thing as a theme from which grinders cannot fashion a new subject matter and work inexorably from Fact One to Fact 849, undressing change as they go.

The changes which best serve organizational purposes are those which keep our young charges quiet a little longer, not those which might enable us to teach literacy, for example, more effectively, or make History an exciting discipline. And so the drift tends to be away from competence in communication, libraries and books, despite the best intentions of teachers, Mafiosi, jocks and librarians. Public education is loaded with hard-working and frustrated people most of whom yearn to teach effectively in a satisfying professional atmosphere, but who so often fail to realize that the price they are forced to pay for survival blunts whatever value there may be in the myriad of magic wands on offer. Many otherwise promising initiatives, as a result, tend to blur the reality of functional illiteracy while only postponing crisis. Given the relatively isolated and uncoordinated stabs at literacy most teachers are able to make, no matter how well-intentioned, there is a great motivation to look for the quick fix of a magic wand. There is little incentive to raise scholarship and standards, even if the teacher is eventually able to perceive the source of his frustrations.

It has already been noted that teachers of writing tend to react to problems and frustrations in diverse uncoordinated ways. Some, faced with a dog's breakfast in student and colleague backgrounds, abilities and attitudes, quietly give up the teaching of writing, or make desultory sorties which result in needless repetition or in working at cross-purposes. Only a few hardy souls will risk burning themselves out attempting to teach the skills most closely allied to communication and thinking,

There tends, accordingly, to be a retreat into one's own classroom, and a reliance on the Compact to insulate oneself from other teachers, administrators, parents and resource personnel like librarians. Such teachers cease to compare notes with more than one or two cronies, and, if they do achieve a hard-won measure of peace, they become extraordinarily resistant to change or criticism, since this will mean starting all over again. If the topic of educational change comes up, it always be something someone else has to do, or it will have to be a magic wand, a gimmick which fits readily into what is already being done.

The result is a sad dilution of energy and optimism, and a steady erosion of the enthusiasm and dedication of so many young teachers. Most teachers have the ability to change, but most of them, unless the circumstances are unusually favourable, will be largely left to their own resources in working out approaches to the teaching of writing. To the extent that their efforts, individually or collectively, fall short of meeting student needs, they will face a more stressful classroom environment, not to mention pressures from outside it. The skills of coping with adolescents of varying academic and social backgrounds, and varying degrees of emotional maturity, will only be partially addressed by formal and in-service training; teachers will still have to find many of their own solutions. But the Compact is unforgiving; the bargain has its price, and, if they fail, the system will spit them out.

So the emphasis returns to survival, which eventually tempers the most idealistic and hard-working. Public education is full of hard-working and frustrated teachers--and this includes jocks too--whose idealism and will to succeed is gradually ground down because the system rewards manipulation and conformity before anything else. The prospect of Blame heightens insecurity, makes egos more intractable to criticism, and makes young teachers less willing to admit to themselves--and almost never to others--that there are ways to do things better.

Educators are so spooked by the prospect of Blame, including blame for functional illiteracy, that they will ignore it, or redefine the problem in an attempt to neuter the threat. The effect is to discredit public education itself, a tragic effect of the failure to define problems which most teachers can be adequately equipped to solve.

Lack of communication, and the failure to identify communication problems and act upon them, also separates teachers in successive grades. Sensitive always to criticism from any source, schools in the same system do little to define writing priorities and skills from kindergarten to Grade 12, or do so superficially without consulting each other. Petty jealousies and turf wars between teachers, administrators and school boards can further reduce effective co-operation between schools, sometimes preventing graduates from one part of the system from being placed promptly in appropriate programs in the next division. Reacting to the lock-step approach common in earlier times, we have now so favoured individual autonomy that we can't pull in a common direction.

Lack of co-ordination is especially distressing to a librarian. Functional illiterates do not visit libraries and take out books. Teachers do not find it rewarding to schedule as many class visits, since minds which lack the capacity to transmit information do not wish to receive it either. Poor writers make poor readers. Faced with growing frustrations, teachers concentrate on writing practices which presuppose only a limited background. As this tends to de-emphasize extensive ordering and transmission of information, teachers will rely less on libraries, and their students, whose disposable reading time teachers effectively control, are thus cut off as well. No amount of coaxing, no magic wand, be the librarian ever so friendly, will get them back. It is really the teacher, more so than the student, who is the primary user in a school.

Thus it happened that within two or three years at my fine new post I began to feel rather like Moltke, who advised the Kaiser after the reverse at the Marne in August, 1914: "Your Majesty, we have lost the war." No matter how well we might do in a traditional sense, the long term fate of the library was sealed. There would always be a degree of library utilization, good as far as it went, but it would fall well short of the vision which had guided those who built the school, nor would it finally slay functional illiteracy. Classroom autonomy was predicated as ever on a textbook approach which made library resources an occasionally useful but sometimes frivolous diversion to the real business of teaching.

It never was a surprise to me, therefore, that, as the years passed, the value of the library and role of the librarian in public education, especially as the computer age dawned, would be more and more open to question. It is most telling that as cash-strapped governments trim education budgets with new austerity measures, the first economy suggested by ministers of education in both Ontario and Saskatchewan was that the post of librarian be either halved or eliminated. So much for pious pronouncements about the library being at the heart of the new "resource-centered" curriculum.

Now there are new initiatives to reduce the number of compulsory English classes a graduate must have, in yet another of the endless turf wars between teachers (your students will want to learn…). Well, limbs which are never used will eventually wither away. It is idle for English teachers to complain that essential priorities in communication are being submarined when they refuse to allow that the problem of functional illiteracy can surface in their own classrooms, and that there is an urgency for a serious rethinking of the business of teaching writing, and of the place of all available library resources.

English teaching and libraries are not alone in feeling the increasing pressure arising directly or indirectly from a waning capacity for literacy. History and other humanities have suffered too. My background in teaching History has made me more conscious both of its potential as an indispensable base for a well-rounded liberal education, and of its value as a vehicle for the teaching of written communication. Functional illiteracy has strengthened only the logic of survival and Blame, and so has taken a toll here as well. We must now turn to what can be done to rehabilitate the teaching of English to slower learners, and then to the teaching of History as essential components of our enterprise to rescue literacy. We will look in detail at the sort of thing which must be done in the teaching of the humanities, since parents and trustees will always fall prey to professional magic wand evasions unless they have a clear perception of the sort of performance they are entitled to expect, and why they are unlikely to get it.