Anyone who is going to buy Kindle 2.0 when it comes out later this year … may I buy your suddenly outdated, craptacular Kindle 1.0 for a “fire sale” price?
UPDATE 08.23.08: Never mind. I have a Kindle in the mail as I type this.
As Morgan points out, Louisville is indeed in a real pickle as far as their library proposals are concerned.
Voters have rejected paying for the expanded libraries and new branches out of new taxes collected. As usual, funds are limited and wants are unlimited. So priorities must be set.
Markets do this by signaling that some resources are needed, and some are over-represented. As an example, there is a new office supply store opening here in Glasgow, KY. A certain company has decided that there is profit to be made by serving this community, so a store is being built. If they are mistaken and no one here wants office supplies that badly, the store will fail. Thus, the optimal level of office-supply stores will be determined.
For public resources like libraries and fire trucks, the optimal level is harder to determine. Voters in Louisville have determined that the proposals set forth are probably too much. But what would a wholly private library actually look like?
I’m guessing they would have a larger selection than most public libraries and more amenities like small cafes, wireless access and play areas for children. Unprofitable things like public meeting rooms would probably be curtailed or cut altogether. Perhaps you could stay and read the books at your leisure, but could not take them home without paying.
Mary Meehan writes in a letter to the Courier-Journal:
Burn books! This is what I heard the majority of voters say. It sickened me. Chris Thieneman has worked to vote this down for 30 days. He says he has won and will continue to try to come up with the money to build the new libraries.
But even if he comes up with the money to build the new libraries, will the money still be there 10 or 20 years from now when we need to update computers, buy books, fix roofs, plumbing or heating that goes bad? (Just like in our homes, things get old and need to be replaced or repaired.)
Saying YES to the libraries would have meant that we would have had the means to build the new facilities, purchase the new equipment, and over the years make any new purchases without asking the people for more new money.
The people who worked on this referendum did not come up with, or work on it, for 30 days. Many volunteers who really care about libraries, not just the people who work at the library, worked many hours to come up with the plan.
We have said NO to knowledge.
MARY E. MEEHAN
Louisville 40223
Darn it. If I’d known that people had worked so very hard to force this tax on every worker in Louisville, I really could’ve gotten behind it.
And I guess she’s right. It is a bit rude to ask for money to build stuff. Simply taking the needed money each payday seems far less intrusive.
I suppose it’s not difficult for some people to imagine a skinny middle schooler wearing tattered clothes sitting a vacant lot eating dirt because the people of Louisville voted against a permanent tax increase. The child, unable to conjugate sentences, will never know how the people of Louisville so disliked knowledge that they destroyed the city’s only opportunity to learn further.
Jonathan Kozol has a new book, Letters to a Young Teacher, which gets a strange writeup in the Washington Post today:
Kozol may be a white Harvard grad who is now past 70, but he takes pains to let readers know that he is still down with the people. For one thing, he has many personal friends in the hood. Also, he believes teachers should not be “servants of the global corporations or drill sergeants for the state.” Naturally, he opposes school vouchers, along with charter schools and, of course, No Child Left Behind. What is Kozol for? Above all else, unleashing children’s natural creativity and playfulness. He also wants inner-city teachers to become activists, bearing witness to social injustice without worrying overmuch about, say, teaching grammar.
In other words, don’t worry so much about getting your kids the education that might enable them to go anywhere in the world and do anything for a living as long as they’re having fun, protected from social injustice. Did I read that correctly?
The author of the review seems to have gotten out of the book what I would have expected:
Kozol is surely right to declare on the very first page that teaching is — perhaps he should have said can be– “a beautiful profession.” But his bumper-sticker rant of a book (”childhood does not exist to serve the national economy,” he fumes) combines kids-say-the-darnedest-things sentimentality with so many rabid and ad hominem attacks on his ideological foes that it quickly becomes tiresome. Kozol seems really to believe that efforts to ensure that students can read and do math, using uniform standards, measured by tests that can be compared from classroom to classroom and school to school, are evidence of corporate repression. Sure, those efforts aren’t always well conceived or thoughtfully implemented. But, at least in principle, couldn’t the ability to be academically self-sufficient instead be viewed as a path to personal liberation?
