Books

Rummaging through my files as I review materials to pass on to one of my great grandsons who appears to be preparing for a professional life similar to mine, and both of us aware of the significant shifts in problems, sources, developments, and progress that he will face – I pause often to determine whether or not this or that is worth his attention for usefulness. I found an article from LIFE magazine for March 9, 1959 – now sixty years ago. It summarized the then current situation of the Harvard University Library. It was perceived as the greatest collegiate library in the world and second only to the Library of Congress among all libraries. It was seen as a great resource that would be vital even if there was nothing more to Harvard than the library. If the books there at the time were placed in a single line, it would extend for at least fifty miles (six and a half million books, increasing at the rate of 150,000 volumes a year, equaling about 500 a day for each work day). The number of library employees back then was 473 persons, the population size of many small towns in America. Some of the holdings are exotic, almost beyond belief, and never used, but may be in some future research so saved for the future. The article was partly focused on the future, the planning of the library for another hundred years, with more than half that now passed since the article. There is nothing in the article about electronics, or Google, or Kindle, and the revolution that makes the library buildings simply storehouses for printed materials, unless there is dramatic change in services from paper to electronics which has occurred and is being implemented even as I write – but not seen in the 100 years’ projection of 1959. We need an updated article on the new Harvard system which rivals the discovery of the printing press of centuries ago. What would Solomon say now, and he wrote about books before the printing press. By his standard the handwritten volumes were already in excess, but a drop in modern buckets even though generating student weariness during ancient times.

There will be a need and that not far off in time, to investigate whether the current shifting to electronic media for information, even to the reading of books, has improved our personal store of knowledge and application to human needs and problem solving, or has simply extended into a mode of entertainment and time consuming activity. Early indications suggest that the media itself invited some poor practices of communicating the language, invites responses that are not substantive and are often crude. Even humanist critics have found that the appeal has not made the hoped-for quality impact, and the concentrations of many users are not in substantive directions. It will take considerable effort for teachers to really make the internet educational programs as effective as the classroom and printed book study for students. My first response to the question of what was my formal education worth to me begins with the impact and relationship I had with several scores of teachers, beginning in my early grades and high school experience. Names of my professors appear with great appreciation of the meaning of this or that field of knowledge and its life application. They seem to become like advanced friends/mentors to my life.

As a student and teacher of students, I have more and more focused teaching not on the subject but on the student with the subject. Systems fail students when they depart from learnings about how to live with others so to understand emotions, variances in values, attitudes of cooperation and leadership, contexts that meet human needs, contributions to others, and finding models of right and wrong in those contexts. The current accent to learn, so leading to greater financial income has so taken the general society that we are losing the first meaning of humanistic education – to find the most efficient route for living together as families, communities and nations. A physician wanted to relate in a class for a better understanding of himself and his relationships with others, and used for admission that he had been cited as the best physician in his community but felt that he was not really educated. He shifted somewhat, and in doing so, became a better physician. He found himself working with persons not just bodies. Reading, thinking and discussing the areas of human relationships and finding models in history of the ideals, will provide the education we need for happy and constructive lives. We begin well by reading Scripture – we really do.