I had left my teaching in Vancouver in a fair state of frustration and undertook a Bachelor of Library Science degree in 1966. When an Alberta school district offered me a bursary to finish my library studies I accepted, although it meant a return to a public school system. The salary, at least, was much better in education than in public libraries.

It seemed strange that in 1966, during a time of unprecedented prosperity, and in a province wealthier than any other, that there should be a large area of the province where school libraries were uncommon and poorly funded. I had the pearl of the district, but it would be considered modest by any standard. The book collection was scanty; AV (Audio-Visual resources) was virtually non-existent. I did cut my library teeth there, and I rather liked the town and the people, but it would prove wise to move on since the library’s long term prospects looked remote, and especially because the relationship between the technical school and the academic high school staffs was poisonous. I discovered belatedly that the librarian was a symbol of whatever technical teachers resented most in a system still dominated by university-trained teachers.

The school’s limited library collection meant that the facility was essentially a study hall. My main diversion that winter, aside from curling, was "Creeping Jesus", as the staff called the principal. He was really not a bad sort, and was certainly not cut from the petty and vindictive cloth that some of my previous superiors had been. He did have a curious habit of hanging a rather conventional picture of Jesus in the library, which I hid in ingenious spots and which he painstakingly resurrected again and remounted, all without a word passing between us on the matter. It was to be some time before I had to deal with an administrator who would seriously seek to bring Christ into the classroom (read: censor religiously incorrect materials).

I was looking around for a worthwhile project to serve as a focus for my new career, and the Alberta situation did not leave me with the impression of a school system which was going anywhere soon. Perhaps there was a turnaround later, but the chief concern of professionals there seemed to be the alleged superiority of education in Alberta to Ontario in particular. I had spent time in schools in Alberta already, and in British Columbia, and had attended night school (high school algebra and geometry) in Ontario for several years during my tour of duty in the Royal Canadian Air Force. Looking back on the three jurisdictions, I find very little to choose between them. For a time Saskatchewan seemed to be breaking fresh ground with its new comprehensive schools, but the others were also soon to be in the throes of the new philosophy, a phenomenon which seems to recur once in each generation. The television revolution was at hand.

There was a commitment to scholarship and writing then which is harder to come by now. Teaching was rooted in textbooks, and a good teacher was a Gifted Grinder whose knowledge and communication skills made him successful in spite of the textbook. Provincial systems had only limited print and non-print resources, but Gifted Grinders made the systems work (more or less) anyway. However, making vast new print and non-print resources available was to prove much simpler than weaning even Gifted Grinders away from textbooks.

The new challenge was not long in coming. A fine new system of Comprehensive High Schools was coming into being in Saskatchewan, based on the famous report by James Conant, (5) combining both technical and academic education under one roof: several acres in fact. The new schools were to have a massive audio-visual component to complement a generous book collection, and a revolution in communication teaching would be centered on the school library. The stage was set for a dramatic demonstration of how the logic of survival and the Compact, over the following fifteen years, would allow the grinders to strangle the new revolution by quiet inches.

I had been contacted by a Saskatchewan school division even while I was at library school, by a consultant who had made a special trip to British Columbia in search of a librarian who had the capacity to make the school library the centerpiece of the new philosophy. He had recommended me with some enthusiasm, but another consultant had already hired a librarian from the University of Toronto.

The new librarian may have felt overwhelmed by the comprehensive school library she found herself in. It was a huge oval affair, with a central office block surrounded by carrels and book stacks, (with a floor of study carrels sited on top) designed to accommodate slide and filmstrip equipment. The new philosophy called for a campus-style library, and provided a budget which was over three times the salary paid to the librarian! The librarian was also a Department Head, and was responsible for putting together a book collection of over 20,000 volumes, and integrating it and a substantial audiovisual resource into the curriculum. It was to prove an order taller than anyone imagined, and my predecessor decided after a year to move to British Columbia, before the main library opened.

I was contacted in my Alberta district again, and flown to Saskatchewan in a bid to persuade me to make the move. There was an aura of excitement in the air and I didn’t need much persuasion. It was indeed a project worthy of building a career around. The librarian’s position was, for the time being, the prestige position on the staff, and as a Department Head along with several others I actually stood on the fringe of an office Mafia. It was a long way from Vancouver.

At first it was difficult to believe my good fortune. For one thing, the principal was a sound professional, the first of a number of fine administrative minds I was to work with. The list was to include most of the best scholars and friends of my career, either in the Mafia or on the teaching staff, and even some on the school board. It was the beginning of that school’s Golden Age.

However, while the planners had found the librarian they felt they wanted, they had assumed that for their purposes the right person in that position, and a number of elite teachers serving as Department Heads, was enough to assure success in the dawning era. It was not that simple. They had seen that the librarian should be a resource person, but they had not thought through the significance of the classroom teacher’s autonomy. The assumption seemed to be that the teachers would just naturally gravitate in the direction of the new print and AV resources, and that only a cold and distant demeanor on the librarian’s part would arrest this drift. Only librarians could hasten a happy fruition in library-teacher relations. Indeed, positive vibes emanating from empathy with the world of books were somehow a distinguishing characteristic of a good librarian (then known as a "media specialist"), so much so that no high school staff could afford to be without one. Should the results be disappointing, no one could doubt who was at fault.

I could and did begin to put together a sophisticated and varied print and non-print collection, aided by budgets which even in 1967 exceeded $20,000. For a generation that school and that library would have few equals anywhere in the country. It offered more than 150 technical and academic courses, and well-funded arts, music and sports programs. Not by miracle or accident did its football teams bid for provincial titles, its musicians receive invitations to the Grey Cup and the Rose Bowl, its musicals win awards, its Reach for the Top teams challenge for provincial and national titles. Its welders, machinists and trades graduates would often be awarded first year standing in provincial technical colleges.

But change was not universal, and in the humanities implementing more than token reform would include waiting for some people to retire. For one thing, some of the staff had been chosen from regulars in the old rural and urban school districts which made up the new Board, and included a substantial number of teachers whose seniority was a key element in their selection. Many of those people had worked a lifetime in one-room multiple grade schools, or in secondary schools much poorer in resources even than Vancouver had been, and they could not easily accommodate film, filmstrips and television. (Students will make no more than minimal use of media unless teachers understand media and integrate them into their teaching. This will be clear when I discuss "Teaching through Television" in Chapter Five). Thus, they could not change within, and the imperatives of classroom autonomy hindered change from without. Thus, despite the presence of a number of brilliant individuals and Gifted Grinders, the library revolution was incomplete from the beginning, achieving a good traditional stance but missing a takeoff.

Ultimately, resistance to change in my new situation was rooted in the mechanics of textbook teaching, complicated by a reserve born partly of the inertia typical of people in the twilight of their careers. I shall have something to say later of the survival potential of textbook mechanics and its impact on libraries and the teaching of communication. But at least part of the resistance was the result of an understandable skepticism of the fad element inherent in new technologies, and we might usefully consider this first. Fads are just generalized magic wands.

These pages will contain some comment on the effect on school libraries in particular on fads in education spawned by technology. Twenty five years ago television was the magic wand. Schools spent millions on studio facilities, and it was widely predicted that a master teacher in a central location would teach hundreds, who could be supervised in their classrooms by economically priced aides instead of teachers. Schools would never be the same. There was even speculation that libraries, in any recognizable form, would be things of the past; librarians, an obsolescent breed.

It was taken for granted that teachers would come trooping with gratitude into the arms of a Media Mafia who had got in on the ground floor and staked out turf on the new frontier. No-one factored in professional autonomy and textbook inertia. The expensive TV production facilities would be closed with a few years. (6) Twenty-five years later, VCRs have merely replaced the old l6mm projectors; teachers and students are still dependent on textbooks. Textbook teaching still proceeds from Fact One to Fact 849.

The problem with technology in education is that it is usually a generation before the full import of a new wave becomes apparent. In the meantime, the tendency is always to modify the new technology to fit established patterns. Those spearheading the drive for a new turf know this, and so invariably appeal to the one thing which will ring the bell of any Grinder: the desire for survival. "Your students will have fun; they will want to learn." The promise is that the new magic wand can somehow be incorporated without changing anything, really. It is something that can be picked up Friday afternoon at convention, and plugged into class somewhere Monday morning. We have never learned to beware the well-intentioned frauds who have persuaded themselves that their new gimmick will succeed in the hands of those whose limitations have sunk the gimmicks which have gone before.

The promise of a liberating wave of television radiating out from a central production facility was doomed from the start. The logic of textbook-centered teaching requires that a substantial part of classroom time be spent on reviewing assigned readings to make sure that students all have the same notes, usually by answering subjective questions on the material. Illustration and motivation occurs within the narrow slot left over from this primary activity. The current group technique fad is seen as an alternative to lecturing, but all it accomplishes is to involve the students in getting up notes from the same limiting sources, although the textbook may be extended by including some other readings. In this context the role of any visual aid is the secondary one of illustrating the basic textbook material.

The problem, which has eluded history and social studies teachers in particular, is how to retain the essential information base provided by the text and still make room for materials which can tie all the facts together in patterns which bring the course to life.

I will deal with my solution to this problem in chapters Five and Six, a solution which matured only when I took my library background back into the classroom and began to work library resources into my basic procedure, only to discover that the grinders were not about to follow me. The mythology prevalent at the time held that the textbook was only the beginning of learning, and wider horizons would dawn naturally with the new enrichment offered and promoted by libraries. We have already noted that the relevance of library print and AV- resources will be determined by how much time, in the teacher’s judgment, is left over for illustration from the primary task of note-taking. The Grinder’s Fact One to 849 approach preempts the bulk of instruction time, but the Comprehensive philosophy still expected librarians to effect the new revolution in the teeth of the grinder mindset. In the end that proved to be a fatal mistake.

The attempt to produce classroom useable AV material in quantity was made, at great expense, in some Saskatchewan schools, but soon proved to be impractical. I produced several sound slide-sets in history early in my career, and some of the staff responded with enthusiasm because my work was tailor-made to their specifications, an advantage over some of the commercial titles then available. But others, sometimes old hands and later rookies, ignored much of the library’s resources, whatever the source. Rookies, in particular, are the first to show how confining the textbook environment can be, for their initial years are spent curled up with their textbooks getting up factual content, and so suggestions as to the benefits of print and non-print resources from the library are put off because the newcomers are too busy becoming established. Later, there will be a reluctance to change in any substantial way what has been so painstakingly set up. The library’s print and AV resources are rather like Ogden Nash’s wonderful woolen socks, which could only be worn once while they were shrinking by.

The first concern of beginners will be to demonstrate that they are in control of their classes, and wider horizons will have to wait. The rules allow the teacher to be isolationist if he sees that as essential to his precious professional freedom, but the librarian is limited to "promoting" the library by being friendly, accessible and welcoming. When a librarian has only his powers of persuasion to depend on in involving new teachers with library materials, it is invariably the case that he will win a few and loose a few. Natural inertia, indifference, insecurity, or ego will all conspire against universal acceptance. It can be a generation before the potential of the new medium can be tapped in any fundamental way, so it could have been predicted that audio-visual production would soon cease to be an important in-house resource and that the TV facility would provide simply another addition to a school’s course offerings, useful to those interested in such things, but adding only a little to the daily routines of most teachers. That would have been a harmless enough outcome had not some television facilities become Trojan horses for their school libraries.

I once visited a school which, unlike ours, had yielded to the fad of a huge television production facility. The young librarian there (unlike her predecessor, who had had no illusions) saw no anomaly in the contrast between her $3,000 budget and half-time assistant in the library and the television facility down the hall, with its three full-time professionals and two part-time paraprofessionals. Even a tiny fraction of the TV production budget would have allowed her to replace the collection of dog-eared paperbacks and out-of-date hardcover books she had been left with. Whereas I had been accepted as the chief AV resource person, she had to be content with whatever turf was left over after the Media Mafia was sated.

She seemed to think that it was enough that the school’s television programs (90% off-air at that) were stored in the library, oblivious to the reality that she had been demoted to a Keeper of Dusty Print Materials and that her library was only a poor appendage of a television department.

A colleague and I once toured a "demonstration" library, as the provincial librarian’s association had dubbed it, trying to fathom what it was supposed to be demonstrating, since the television facility stood in stark contrast to a disaster area masquerading as a book collection. We shook our heads in disbelief at the English reference collection, which consisted chiefly of a wall of the old green edition of Mastering Effective English. When does a textbook storage room become a library?

The other major English reference feature was a twenty volume anthology of English literature which at one time must have been donated to every school library in Saskatchewan. I had a set in my own library, in storage. It was copyrighted 1893, which startled me when I took over the old library, and I had even contacted the provincial archives to determine whether I had a collector’s item on my hands. After all, twenty volumes of obscure turn-of-the-century prose and poetry, complete with uncut pages and unspoiled by even a single circulation in decades, had to be a remarkable phenomenon.

It wasn’t. Her set was also in exactly the same mint condition, but, unlike mine, was still "in circulation". It was mute testimony to the relevance of print materials in a textbook-centered environment disturbed briefly by a technological fad which had absorbed most of the funding which might have breathed life into the print collection.

The clincher came when we all gathered in the main library hall, a sea of study carrels nearly devoid of students. (There were at least two, because I glimpsed a flying wad of paper at the far end of the hall). As a class went by on its way to the television viewing room (the only component we actually saw being used) we received a brief talk on the library’s operation, complete with a claim to a circulation of 700 items per day. With her English collection in mind, I asked how that was possible. The reply, without amplification, was: "our program is unique". Despite the library’s demonstration status, there was no brochure spelling out that uniqueness or detailing how it had been achieved, and the librarian herself promptly changed the subject. (7)

The essential point to note in these examples is: not that the libraries in question were being poorly run, but that the librarians felt compelled to gloss over the obvious shortcomings. Given the Compact, one is not supposed to draw attention to practices elsewhere (especially teaching practices!) which undermine the library’s role. This will be richly documented as we proceed. Survival requires non-interference. Knowing that one cannot ensure effective library use by exerting pressure on teachers to structure their activities appropriately, the librarian still has to worry about being held accountable for, or at least embarrassed by, any weakness in circulation.

But if a library is not being used to its full potential, why hire a librarian, who was supposed to ensure just this? It is the fear that their relevance might be called into question by circulation figures that encourages librarians to justify their existence by creating a myth: if a professional librarian is employed, teachers and students and teachers will find that learning is fun and will be more likely to respond positively. Faced otherwise with the prospect of offending colleagues by honest criticism, librarians may grasp at their own magic wand: a claim to an essential role as warm and welcoming souls radiating an infectious love of books which will draw users to them. More likely their colleagues will thrust the role upon them, since it makes librarians the measure of the success of the resources.

All this ignores studies which seem to indicate that only one in sixty students reads regularly after leaving high school. Are we to believe that librarians are letting down the side? The assertion of indispensability is pathetically irrelevant during crises in education funding, when the librarian’s position is notoriously vulnerable.

The obsolescence of libraries and expository writing anticipated by some educators intoxicated by the Computer Revolution is a striking repudiation of the audio-visual revolution a generation ago, which predicated such a key role for libraries. What was the point of making librarians the measure of library utilization if the vision of the role of libraries which inspired the Comprehensive School was the last wheeze of a dying culture?

In our case, public criticisms of library utilization came especially from disaffected rural members of the school board who enjoyed discomfiting the urban intelligentsia, and the favorite delaying tactic of my own considerate Office Mafia was to conduct yet another survey to determine what students want from their library, and to determine whether the librarian was sufficiently warm and welcoming. Both moves had the disadvantage of being the usual evasions intended to confine damage control to the library rather than allow issues affecting the staff in general to get loose. Offend the librarian and the Mafia offends only one; offend humanities departments and you alarm nearly everyone.

The question: ^"Are you being welcomed to the library?" can be an attempt to embarrass a librarian personally, but it foundered in my case when 8O% of the teenage respondents said they were. That was pretty good in a facility so constructed that line-of-sight supervision was impossible, and thereafter no-one bothered to return to the matter. A recommendation by my own Mafia that the library be redesigned to make supervision easier—a clever ploy—was rejected.

I can recall a meeting with the board where the issue of friendliness was brought up, in an attempt to curry favour with the board chairman, who had a penchant for trying to embarrass the school by sniping at the library (classroom teachers are much less vulnerable, since their doors are opaque to the public, but the librarian, especially in such a large, lavish and public facility, lacks both the anonymity of the teacher and the relative immunity of the Mafia—remember that I was only on the fringe). The question arose over the matter of book losses, and implied that there might be a link between that and my methods of maintaining discipline in the library. I noted that losses might be higher because circulation was improving, which prompted an attempted coup de grace: "then you admit that utilization has been low?"

I replied to this shard by asking the board member what my book loss quota was. The response was a puzzled look, so I explained (with a careful display of patience) that obviously I had to lose enough books so that no-one could say that the library was not being utilized, but not so many that anyone could claim that I was being unfriendly.

External public pressures are always alarming to teachers, and these are not turned aside by clever ripostes. I was used to the librarian being a scapegoat in urban-rural board politics, but my colleagues reacted with near panic. This was the era of the paperback, which was widely touted as a surefire lure for young readers, a welcome antidote to the creeping influence of television, and a self-contained answer to the future of books in modern culture. For anyone working in the shadow of the Compact, the lure was irresistible, since it promised literacy by seduction instead of subject mastery. Alarmed, if not panicked, by the possibility that the question of library utilization might back up eventually into the classroom, some teachers began to press for a paperback rack to be positioned hard against the entrance to the library, where the beneficent impact of the paperback would hit students entering the library right between the eyes. While I was reluctant to say so openly, the symbolism of the demand was painfully obvious: the paperback was effectively an alternative to allowing the librarian to breach the barrier of classroom autonomy. The staff was saying: this magic wand will make print a part of student consciousness only if the librarian takes the responsibility—its his problem, not ours.

I knew at the time that, unless I could sell the library-based book review as a primary vehicle in the writing program, the revolution I had come to Saskatchewan to effect was probably over. Despite the illusions of the comprehensive philosophy, the pattern of library use would never be more than an intermittent and secondary add-on (Mafiosi love the term "enrichment") to classroom activity, and the school library would function essentially like a public library catering to whatever interests it could tap on its own in its particular clientele. The curious magic wand mentality that assumed that all our tribulations over inspiring young people to read books could be cured at a stroke by the paperback format had an ominous implication: that introducing the paperback would be the limit of any contemplated reform. I would remain accountable for any shortcomings in a library conceived as the centerpiece of a comprehensive school, but I would be on my own.

Before I retired, I wanted to feel sure when I looked in my mirror that I had at least made some last attempt to squeeze past the classroom door. This meant specialized reading lists tied to a writing program, and targeting specific student interests with the most suitable young people’s titles available. We had even published a list of high interest, low reading level books in our

collection, featuring some 400 books informally classified under such headings as Adventure, Westerns, Women in the World, Social Tensions, Growing up, Finding Oneself, and so on, rather than relying exclusively on the rigid and limited subject headings found in standard library cataloguing. The informal classification had been developed to fill out the reading areas laid down in the curriculum guides, and so maintain a link with what teachers were doing, and make it easier for them to move toward the more ambitious writing program I hoped to promote. Success in promoting an interest in reading, even if attainable, is gravy to a library. Library-based writing is bread and butter.

The short shelf life of paperbacks favours casual reading. A hardcover collection is better suited to a more systematic approach to writing, since successful titles will be around much longer, allowing a basis on which to build. It would be better to allow paperbacks to augment, rather than compete with, the hardcover format. I proposed as an alternative that the new circular racks be positioned within fiction area along with the hardcover collection, which would allow me to prepare shelf displays featuring both, and that recreational reading guide the selection of paperback titles. The English teachers agreed with some residual reluctance, and I put the collection together, diverting some of my budget to good used young adult paperbacks. This did little to further my ultimate goal, but I hoped that it would lessen the danger of friction with the teachers.

Within a few days, I was to know better. The paperback racks were installed, but the English teachers had no intention of leaving anything to chance. Without my realizing it, some of them were stopping by the library to check on the status of the collection. Within days, someone discovered around 4 pm one afternoon that I had not yet got around to filling empty slots on the racks left by student loans that day. The discovery was relayed within minutes to the other teachers: "He’s trying to sabotage the paperbacks!"

I hardly knew whether to laugh or swear. Certainly I would have resorted to sabotage if that would have served any useful purpose, but this incident taught me that the real problem was not my unwelcome initiatives, but my very existence. As long as any part of the Blame for any alleged shortfall in circulation and reading interest might find its way back to the classroom, the library would be perceived as a threat as much as an aid.

I began to have a heightened appreciation for the Greek legend about shooting the messenger, stressing as I did that it was useless to attempt damage control in the classroom by diverting to the library solutions to major questions in literacy and communications. I began also to appreciate more why so many of my colleagues in other school libraries were so preoccupied with keeping up appearances in library use. The myth of an infectious love of books was all that they had been left with.

It is a fraud, however, to pretend that librarians have a magic touch denied to others of turning non-readers into readers, whether by sheer personality or by gimmicks such as paperbacks. All the paperbacks did was to grab the attention of students who were already readers. In the absence of a policy of obliging teachers to devise, with a librarian’s assistance, a meaningful program of communication instruction based on library materials, it would never be possible to capture a wider range of readers. Worse yet, the pursuit of a magic reading wand to make library use Fun would blunt the subordination of the reading program to the teaching of communication in general. If browsing amongst paperback forage did actually create contented student cows, teachers of writing would simply go back to sleep.

I will detail later how a writing program can productively exploit library resources in general , and print materials in particular, which students raised in a television culture tend to ignore, in pursuit of communication skills which remain essential and neglected. Creating a new interest in reading for its own sake should be seen as a by-product of the larger purpose. I will also try to show how the potential of television can be tapped in the teaching of history in a way which uses the unique characteristics of the technology rather than merely substituting the VCR for the 16mm projector.

In either case, the library ought to be a key resource, but while teachers are typically told that the library is essential to them they are never taught how to structure their teaching to make productive use of the library. The reasons for the failure to take advantage of the superb resources which are available at a reasonable cost will be clearer once we grasp the mechanics determining how teachers and librarians interact.

Grinding from Fact One to Fact 849 was what the older teachers were used to. For them the cornucopia of new materials meant just so much more work. They could keep their students busy and quiet without upending their routines and taking chances on a media they didn’t understand. There was still pressure to give at least a few token library assignments, so the new book collection always had some utility, but it was definitely not in fashion for the librarian to have an effective means of influencing teacher priorities and procedures in a way which would effectively move the library into the classroom. It is the failure to remedy this flaw that guarantees that young teachers, with weaker scholarship and experience, are more likely to fall into established older patterns than to follow a librarian’s leadership into new ones.