“My library was dukedom large enough” The Tempest, Shakespeare

“The act of poetry is a rebel act.” Farewell to English, Michael Harnett

Some people are never happy. After writing my last post on how it might be possible to get students to read more, one commentator criticised that there was no mention of school librarians. Well, it was a blog post: the list of things which went unmentioned dwarfed what was written about. This post seeks to rectify that omission.

Changing the culture of a school is a big ask. By the time they reach secondary school, many children are aware that reading isn’t cool. According to the National Literacy Trust, less than a third of students read outside of school and about 20% say they feel embarrassed if their friends saw them reading a book. In far too many schools, it’s not considered cool to be clever. I’m not aware of any surveys of young people’s attitudes towards libraries, but anecdotally, they don’t seem to be particularly positive. But it wasn’t always thus, was it?

As a youngster, I spent a lot of time at my local library. Not possessing a TV and not being keen on team sports, there didn’t seem a lot else to do in the late 1970s. I loved the library. It wasn’t so much a sanctuary as a treasure trove. I read everything and anything. I began with Asterix and Tin Tin before graduating to grown-up fiction. The librarians got used to me borrowing all sorts. None of the library staff stick in my mind as complete personalities – they were a shifting array of shushing, no-nonsense women who either smiled, raised their eye brows or frowned at my eclectic choices. Back then Eric Van Lustbader was quite popular but the librarian wouldn’t let me borrow a copy of Ninja. At the time I was incensed; later I discovered is would have been pretty risque fare for a ten-year-old. I even borrowed audio recordings and found myself quite taken with The Goons, and I owe my understanding of the laws of thermodynamics to Flanders and Swann.

The school library at my secondary school was an extraordinary place (at least in my memory) full of darkened corridors, hidden nooks and the most surprising finds. I read Lord of the Rings in the first term of my first year and Crime and Punishment in the second. I’m still not sure which I prefer.

In my third year of secondary school, I found myself minded to truant. There were, as far as I can remember, almost no consequences for this as long as you turned up for either morning or afternoon registration – they weren’t fussy which. I began by ‘missing the bus’ with a group of similarly disaffected pals but eventually graduated to taking the bus in the opposite direction into Birmingham city centre. I’d head to the central library and read. It’s only in retrospect I realise quite how odd this sort of behaviour actually was, but back then it seemed entirely reasonable to miss out on double physics and supplement my education in the manner of my choosing.

rad camWhen I did my PGCE at Oxford, I loved swooping past the clusters of American tourists into the domed splendour of the Radcliffe Camera, part of the wonderful Bodleian Library. I loved that a card had to be filled in requesting a book before the librarians went off to search through the stacks for it. I loved that many of the books are stored beneath the streets in labyrinthine tunnels that are occasionally opened to the public. And I loved that I had to swear an oath before being granted access:

I hereby undertake not to remove from the Library, nor to mark, deface, or injure in any way, any volume, document or other object belonging to it or in its custody; not to bring into the Library, or kindle therein, any fire or flame, and not to smoke in the Library; and I promise to obey all rules of the Library.

To cut these meanderings short, suffice it to say, I’d always felt at home in libraries. That is, until I became a teacher. While I was off becoming way cooler than I’d ever managed to be as a pupil, libraries had undergone a similar transformation. Suddenly they’d been redesignated Learning Resources Centres and were full of computers. During break and the lunch the geeky children no longer read, they surfed. Or played games. Or did something else utterly incomprehensible on the computers. In one school I worked in the ‘library’ was actually closed during lunch as there were three lunches split over an hour and a half and lessons were scheduled in there. In another school there was no library. The books had been cleared out and redistributed across various classrooms in order to fit even more computers in there! Librarians are now routinely expected to be glorified reprographics technicians and when they’re not laminating stuff, they spend all their time feeding the beast that is Accelerated Reader and producing endless reports on the number of words children have read.

I’m certain there are many excellent school libraries out there as well as ranks of inspirational school librarians. Sad to say, I’ve rarely had the fortune to share a school with them. All the school librarians I’ve known have been excellent people and right-minded lovers of books, but have been shackled by demands so varied and immense that they’ve not been able to do what they most believed in.

What’s worse, as a young English teacher I came to dread library lessons. Otherwise mild-mannered children would turn into truculent oafs at the mention of the library. The majority would sit and quietly chat, a few would actually read and some – I see now that it was those for whom reading was a constant reminder of their inadequacies – would spend most lessons ‘choosing’ books or pretending to read them whilst engaged in some more nefarious pursuit. My role was to be the Reading Police. I would march around crossly spotting books being held upside down and ensuring that no one saw reading as a pleasure. I’ve come to believe that while silent reading is what we should aim for, it doesn’t necessarily make for a great school experience. Since those early days I’ve tried hard to make more of library lessons than this and have met some small success, but rarely have I been able to pass on the magical appeal, the irresistible tug I felt for libraries.

One librarian I worked with stands out. Toby Dyer was an incongruous figure. For one he was young – in his late twenties – and for another he was cool. Much cooler than any librarian has a right to be. He had a tattoo which read, “Reading Is A Rebel Act”, a sentiment that rang deep within – this was how reading always felt to me as a teenager! He made it his business to imbue books with edginess and danger. He engaged in what he called ‘reading terrorism’ – bursting unannounced into classrooms, reading a passage of prose or poetry and then dashing off, cackling maniacally. His library was chaotic: he had a rather timid assistant who seemed to do all the actual work while Toby made his rebellious way through the school. His approach was not uniformly appreciated. He got a lot of complaints and a fair few reprimands. Regrettably, he moved on rather rapidly.

I met up with Toby last year. During our reminiscences, he told me about a reading assembly he’d given one World Book Day. He took the stage, his face a thunderclap, wielding a copy of Kevin Brooks’ The Bunker Diary. Although this book won the Carnegie Award in 2014, it’s probably one of the most controversial children’s books ever written. Anyway, Toby told his audience that he’d caught a year 8 boy reading the book and had confiscated it. He told them some of the more salacious details and said that the school absolutely could not endorse such filth. He said he’d heard there were other illicit copies floating around the school and that he was running an amnesty in the library: if copies were handed in before the end of the week no further action would be taken. Apparently he got the deputy head to go along with him. Anyway, he left his ‘amnesty’ pile lying around, unsupervised in the library and by the end of the day, every copy had been borrowed. The book became the most talked about reading phenomena since Harry Potter first hit the shelves.

Now, I’m not advocating Toby’s methods or suggesting this is how school libraries should be run – he’d probably have terrified me as an eleven-year-old – but I do think that in ever so many schools, libraries have become sad, neglected places. I’m really keen to hear about any examples of great practice of running school libraries or of making reading lessons come alive to share and pass on to other schools.

NB – I should point out that I am not nor have I ever been a school librarian. Anything I say in the post should be seen purely as a product of my own rather narrow experience.