It’s election time—time to pretend to care about children and education! Young people are the largest disempowered class in our country and their rights are systematically violated and neglected. Youth issues are feminized and minimized, since women do most of the work caring for and about children. Women’s work is frivolous and sweet and children are cute and certainly none of this is radical or tough or important. “Oh, what about the children?!” cry the folks who really don’t care, who don’t work to end homelessness, hunger, poverty, illiteracy, and the prison industrial complex.

While listening to NPR’s Fresh Air I learned of Geoffrey Canada’s Harlem Children’s Zone and started getting irritated. Terry Gross talked of how “good” teachers and schools are insufficient; at the end of the day kids are returning to violent communities that “don’t value education.” How does she know what “they” value and what does it look like to value education? From what I caught of the conversation, there was no discussion of community activism and organizing, of the structural and institutional disadvantages faced by poor people of color, of the historical tragedy of separating children from their families and communities in the interest of uplift and success building—away from the community. The blame and burden are placed on disadvantaged communities, not on a racist and classist capitalist society. And as always there was no discussion of the library’s role in the community and education.

Public library staff know that public libraries are de facto after school programs.
Libraries are hidden. Libraries are inessential. Library budgets are slashed with ease. And yet libraries function as free childcare for many caregivers and a seemingly safe place for kids to go after school. We are the silent babysitters. After school programs are mentioned in education plans with never a nod to the work that libraries are doing already, to the void we must fill because the system fails so many.

People I meet tell me my job sounds “nice and quiet.” They seem to have archaic notions of early 1900s libraries with long tables, dusty tomes, and austere silence. But the truth is that libraries have a loudly beating heart. Library patrons come to us for their divorce papers, swim trunks, tax forms, free satchels (?), fax machine, restroom, batteries, condoms, voter registration, childcare, Safeway application, money, phone calls, help getting their really bad manuscript published, candy, lunch, bus passes, a marriage proposal, resume help, and yes, books and internet access. Some of these are obvious and wonderful and some are ridiculous but it is what it is.

I have a feeling that libraries had a more clear identity in the early days. Now we are a shelter, a recreation and community center, a day care, a coffee shop, a Claire’s Accessories, or a sacred piece of book heaven. We are everywhere and nowhere. Maybe this is because library patrons are not the media creators and our role in culture is therefore vague and undefined, invisible. Doing library work can be a meta mind swirl. You know there are people who need your services. You feel like “library” is a third place and a public good, an integral part of a functioning democracy, an essential institution like a bank or a grocery store. They have money and food. We have ideas. However libraries often appear only in library publications. I think that’s why the Sarah Palin librarian kerfuffle was important to a lot of library workers. For once we were in the news!

Andrew Carnegie—the scamp—believed libraries were an important part of education, that they were a unique place for people to “share cultural opportunities on a basis of equality." Libraries need to be part of the conversation on education. What can we do and why are we here?


"Libraries will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no libraries." —Henry David Thoreau

Posted by: Kati Nolfi