Saturday, December 22, 2018
Life Is Library
On the American Spectator website, Bill Croke posted his observations and thoughts about libraries:
"Public libraries seem to be crowded with people who don’t have a clue as to the function of a library as envisioned by Benjamin Franklin, who founded the first American one in colonial Philadelphia.
In 1731 the twenty-five-year-old precocious American Renaissance Man helped found the 'Library Company of Philadelphia,' with the radical idea of lending books to the public, thus improving upon the classical ideal of one that comes down to us from antiquity, an institution designed to serve a class of elite scholars but closed to the masses. It even bested the idea of subscription literary societies that flourished in England starting in the 17thcentury. Today, libraries function as daytime homeless shelters, video game arcades for young folks, and sites for municipal meetings and civic activities, craft fairs and vocational STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) programs, all conducted at close quarters with thousands of unread books."
