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HISD to eliminate librarians and convert libraries into disciplinary centers at NES schools
Not worth a post as top level thread on it's own; but hilariously dystopic enough to post here. It's only one (admittedly large and important) SD, but this is the type of shit Margret Atwood would write about as a totally out there thought experiment.
Hopefully enough people get mad it stops there.
Can somebody please steelman the case for libraries at all? Certainly there was a time when writing things down on dead trees was important, and publishing a book was an important way of contributing to the collective knowledge, but that just isn't the case anymore.
The libraries should be removed from every school, certainly the people with "library science" degrees should be removed, and the space should be used for something more in line with the original intent. Every school should get a few H100s, make a more advanced computing lab, put a CNC mill in there, etc. Libraries should basically be very well funded makerspaces at this point, not shelves of useless books.
I guess I get a library as a sortof throwback to something that was needed a long time ago, but at this point books are like vinyl records. Cool, and I love them, and dream of having a massive library in my home some day, and I am a compulsive book buyer, but...not really necessary for a school. In addition to that, it seems like L I B R A R Y has become some sort of cultural importance for the left, where scary book burning or book bans has become somehow meaningful to them.
Get rid of the libraries. Replace them with materials science labs or something cool.
Libraries are a more romantic and sensual place to interact with words than a computer screen is. I have had dreams about being in libraries full of arcane knowledge, I cannot remember ever having had a dream about surfing Wikipedia. You yourself say that you dream of having one.
I think that what we should really get rid of is mandatory education. It is a day care program dishonestly masquerading as an educational system and it packs kids into close contact with each other right at the age at which most of them behave more like chimpanzees than at any point before or after in their lives. To force this on people is fundamentally abusive. School also trains kids that what they should expect from life is to be closely observed and trained by bureaucrats. And in the age of the Internet, school is also near-irrelevant as a source of learning when it comes to anything above very basic math and reading skills.
Tear down the mandatory education system.
@VoxelVexillologist said below that classroom discipline is red-coded. I disagree. Some boring bureaucrat loser disciplining a bunch of kids into sitting still and listening to him drone on and on is at least as blue-coded as it is red-coded. Sure, maybe classroom discipline supported by a threat of violence is somewhat red-coded (and abusive), whereas classroom discipline maintained by nagging and shaming is more blue-coded (and also abusive, just not as much), but the actual goal of the education system is not red-coded. Really the education system is neither blue-coded nor red-coded. It is corporate-coded. It keeps kids out of their parents' way so that they can work and it prepares kids for a dull life working the cogs of the machine.
A kid's proper response to the education system is to tell the teacher to eat a dick. When I read about school shootings, my usual reaction is to wish that the kid had just focused on shooting teachers and staff instead of gunning down fellow kids.
Beautifully said! The mandatory education system is, along with factory farming, one of the most horrible moral abuses of our day. It's incredible how ordinary people just paper over the horror that kids must deal with, and think throwing more money at the problem will solve it.
Tear. It. Down!
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