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“Vocational Awe” and the Awesomeness of Vocation
I don’t think I will ever forget the thrill that coursed through my spine as I walked behind a library service desk for the first time, or the moment of glowing pride I felt when the first patron looked at me and asked, “Can you check this out for me?” and I said, grinning ear to ear, “Yes, sir. Yes I can.” Having gotten a whirlwind twenty hours of training Thursday/Friday/Saturday, I will now be one day a week at the Chanhassen Library and two at the library in Victoria. What both have in common is that, for the first time in my life, I walk into a place to work because I want to work there, and the satisfaction of that for someone who graduated into the Great Recession is inexpressible. The facilities are lovely and my coworkers are welcoming and almost overwhelming in their generosity and helpfulness, but what truly makes the hours seem to fly by is the sense of accomplishment in service—that I have, by the grace of God, finally managed to put myself someplace where I can send my wife a text by lunchtime saying, “I have genuinely helped so many people today.”
I read an interesting article yesterday on “vocational awe” and the way it can negatively impact working conditions for library staff. It is a phenomenon I am very familiar with among teachers, and I am glad to see attention brought to it. Yet I keep the reservation that, although I certainly want to see library staff well-treated, well-remunerated, and empowered to advocate for themselves, I would never want us to lose our sense that we are engaged in a sacred vocation—one that serves ideals upheld by all the world’s great philosophical traditions, both religious and secular. Fobazi Ettarh writes that “when the rhetoric surrounding librarianship borders on vocational and sacred language rather than acknowledging that librarianship is a profession or a discipline … we do ourselves a disservice.” She is not wrong when this is presented as an either/or dichotomy, but it is the suggestion of dichotomy that troubles me. As she notes in the paper, Martin Luther defined a vocation as “the ways a person serves God and his neighbour through his work in the world.” Some version of this formula for understanding the dignity of labor can be found almost universally across the world’s traditions, I think precisely because it reconciles its two halves. There is service to God and neighbor, and there is work in the world. Much as with Jesus’ teaching on whether a servant of God can render taxes to Caesar (Matthew 22:21; Mark 12:17; Luke 20:25), each must be rendered its due and, much as in Christology, the fusing of the two natures into the one person of “vocation” does not annihilate their particularity.
Librarianship will, as Ettarh argues, not be sustainable if it is not addressed from the outside as a profession comparable to any other at the same skill level. The library will, however, not be the magical place it is to work in (or for patrons to visit) if it is not felt, from the inside, as a vocation. This past week, the feeling that has suffused me has not merely been that this is a job that matches well to my skills, or that presents me with interesting and enjoyable tasks, though both those things are undoubtedly true. It has been, rather, that I have entered into a place that I am meant to be, and that the work I do is no longer merely an economic support to my life, but is instead a part of my human flourishing—calling me to overcome myself in the acquisition of new skills, new visions, new understandings, and new ways of healing the world in the best sense of the Jewish tikkun ‘olam. Librarianship is not the only work that can do this. Indeed, any work can do this for a saint, as reflected in the Buddhist saying, “Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water; after enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.” Most of us, however, find it easier to draw close to God and our neighbor in some kinds of work than others. Library work, I find, is the work that works for me and, all other considerations aside, discovering a vocation is, quite literally, awe-some.
New Library Job
Yesterday, I was offered the position of Library Assistant for the Carver County (MN) Library, which I was thrilled to accept. Though I have served as ad hoc support to school library and media centers on many occasions, this is my first real library job and I could not be more excited to start putting what I’ve studied about library operations into practice (and no doubt unlearning a lot of what I thought I knew in the process).
If there’s a lesson so far, it’s that persistence pays off. This was my third year running to apply to the county for an assistant position, and it was rather surreal seeing the employment offer land in my inbox with the same distinctive and familiar formatting of messages that have shot me down many times before. Hence I am curiously grateful to the legions of literary editors who have sent me rejection slips and taught me thereby that even good editors sometimes turn down good work, and that there is no shame in sending out twenty-five, or fifty, or a hundred submissions to get one acceptance letter, especially when you are first starting out. Years sending out poems and essays thus taught me personally what I heard as a child from my photographer father—that you have to shoot five hundred photos to get the one the magazine will print. (And who says we don’t need arts in schools?)
Well, now I have an acceptance, and while a library assistant may not yet be a full-fledged librarian, I might at least be indulged so far as to take the word “aspiring” off the front of “information professional”. Or maybe not, because the day that I stop aspiring will be the day I no longer merit to be called an information professional. I have only the dimmest blue before me of the mountains I will climb, but they grow closer, and every step covers a little more ground when a vote of confidence helps you stand tall.
Dakota County Library Poetry Contest
Many thanks to all the library staff and community volunteers that made this year’s Dakota County Library Contest possible. I am very pleased to say that one of my pieces, “The Wind,” took second place in the adult category. You can read it and the other winning entries here.
Of Place and Memory in the Library
Yesterday, I had an interview for a school media position at a local high school. Throughout it, I was repeatedly put in mind of the conversations I have had with my good friend Christopher Cocchiarella, who writes over at Mindful Media Musing on how media technologies impact our experiences with information. He has many times shared with me interesting research on the ways in which paper books outperform electronic copy in reader engagement and retention of information, and I knew he would have smiled when the media secretary, present at the interview, began to tell me how the school had invested a great deal of money in configuring itself to provide students with ebooks, only to find that, almost uniformly, they eschewed them in favor of paper.
What ended up giving me the most food for thought, however, was not her wry reflections on ebooks, but the implications of her job title. The school found itself without a media specialist many years ago, and instead began staffing the media center with office specialists classed as clerical/administrative employees, working under the direct supervision of the principal. Hence, I found myself chatting with the “media secretary”. It is an arrangement I have never encountered before and which, as far as they knew also, is unique to them.
So I took the opportunity to ask what they felt the strengths and challenges of that arrangement had been. In perfect accord, both the media secretary and the principal said that the greatest advantage had been the ability to shelter themselves from the district’s efforts to reconfigure media centers as community areas and “makerspaces” (a tug of war familiar to public librarians as well).
The media secretary pointed out, very cogently, that a high school is already replete with such spaces—workshops, student support centers, etc. More importantly, however, she told me that, just as with the ebooks, student preference dictated resistance to the trend. While a portion of the media center was set aside for collaborative group work, students continued to come primarily for quiet and solitude. Again and again, the feedback they received was that students prized the little corners in which they were able to sit with a book or just with their own thoughts without distraction.
To hear this touched my heart in a way that surprised me, as I was suddenly cast back to my own days as a theology student in the particular nook of the library that I regarded as mine. It was a stand-alone little desk with a hood, tucked into a back corner of the third floor right against a pillar and a window overhung with the branches of two sweeping elm trees. It was a little island on the edge of the sea of shelves, which was only infrequently plied by any other vessel. There I had my first introductions to Koine Greek and learned carefully to sound and shape the letters. There I read Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion, which did much to shape me as a young man.
And in that moment of remembrance, with Chris’ thoughts on the relationship of media forms to experience in the back of my mind, that I realized how profoundly the space itself had imprinted the readings on my mind. All the words I had grazed upon in that little patch of pasture came back to me alongside the memory of the light through the elm leaves, the grain of the desk’s wood, the distant squeak of the squat little rolling stool that someone seemed always to be using on the other side of the third floor, amidst the more popular subjects. Suddenly I remembered the edges of the pages in that particular copy of Institutes rough against my fingertips, the font of the Greek text spilling languidly across unhurried pages, and with all of that, passages of text that I did not know I still knew.
Amidst all our psychological research on state-dependent memory and similar effects, I wonder if we have nonetheless forgotten something very basic about memory. In the medieval ars memoria, information was retained by linking it to places (and artifacts in those places) held in the mind. Masters like Peter of Ravenna were able to hold thousands of verses of scripture or reams of canon law in their heads by mentally furnishing a familiar house with reminders of them, or imagining a walking path that contained symbols of all the information to be recalled along its way. Without even meaning to (and long before I read of Peter of Ravenna), I had done something very similar with this small corner of the library and my utter, attentive presence to its idyllicism.
Community commons and makerspaces are wonderful resources, and libraries certainly add value in making them available, but if we allow them, as sometimes happens, to crowd out those little corners—if we allow them to sweep aside and assimilate all of those little nooks into the sterile, open floorplans of makerspaces whose stacks have been transmuted into ebook respositories—I fear we will lose something not just of the aesthetic and romance of the library, but something of its efficacy as a space for learning, and something of the means by which it helps us to build lasting relationships with the words that shape our lives.
Peak Literacy
I was recently invited to interview for a gig answering questions via live chat for fifty cents a minute. What struck me about this was that I was contacted in my capacity as a scholar of world religions and, indeed, my interview included me responding to a number of prompts such as “What caused the Sunni/Shiite split?” Who, I wondered, is paying something, perhaps, on the order of a dollar a minute to ask these kinds of questions? I could see spending that money to ask a medical professional if your problem warrants seeing a doctor (who will charge you much more), or a legal professional if you should involve an attorney (who will also charge you much more) in your case. This would be prudent fact finding. I could also see the independently wealthy and idly curious taking a moment at a bus stop to ask things like “What makes storm clouds so dark?” or “Who invented windshield wipers?” but nobody idly wonders about Islamic history at bus stops—at least, nobody who isn’t the kind of person you would be interviewing to be on the answering end of such a service anyway.
The answer to my idle wondering, I figured, is probably students—students getting way too much money at college from mommy and daddy and having been sent there with a tragic deficit in functional literacy. I described these students at high school in my last post, utterly dependent on a search engine to answer a question for them, and ultimately unable to determine for themselves if the answer they have received is even relevant. The collapse of functional literacy had been an anecdotal observation on my part; here, in this interview, was somebody whose market research had suggested it would be an enduring business opportunity.
I don’t wish to be misunderstood. Basic literacy—the ability to decode letters for their sounds and determine what word is represented—will probably remain at the 99+% mark in the “first world” for many, many years to come. Functional literacy is something deeper—the ability to really understand what you have read, to parse the argument an author is making, to relate its constituent parts to your own pre-existing knowledge, to rework the ideas offered in light of your own reasoning and respond to them effectively. Basic literacy is about whether you know what words have been written; functional literacy is about whether you understand why they have been written, and can give an informed opinion about whether they could, or should, be written differently.
It is this skill that my high schoolers lack, and that some portion of the users of this new app apparently lack as well. All of which prompted me to wonder, have we passed the point of peak literacy? Will this skill ever return to the broadly distributed societal levels we saw between the late 19th century and the two World Wars? There are a few reasons that I think the answer may well be no.
- Outsourcing and Automation of Intellectual Labor
- The Growth of Multimedia
- Changing Concepts of the Purpose of Public Schooling
Some months back I heard a roundtable discussion on public education reform on NPR, with one guest making a very important point. He noted that the best-performing schools in America by a variety of metrics are private. These vary wildly from one another in pedagogical philosophy, construction of curriculum, location, ethnic and socioeconomic composition of the student body, training and remuneration of teachers, and a thousand other factors, but they have one significant thing in common—they conceive a primary facet of their mission as weeding students out. This sounds horrific to most contemporary people used to the inclusive ideology of the public school system, but even public schools for much of their history viewed it as part of their job to determine when a given student had reached the limit of their academic potential and would be better served by being moved out into some kind of apprenticeship or other opportunity. It was quite common before the Wars for a student to graduate what we now call middle school and take “working papers” to get a job instead of going on to high school. There were certainly sad cases of economic necessity forcing bright and promising students to do this, but working papers were also often an outlet for kids who didn’t like school and weren’t succeeding there to go get real-world experience and build a sense of dignity and self-worth making their own way in life, instead of developing the neurotic behaviors of caged animals in some classroom parsing the structure of Shakespearean sonnets. (It is worth noting that not all states even had compulsory education laws until 1918, and that the Supreme Court determined in 1972 that Amish children could not be subjected to compulsory education laws past the eighth grade.)
This began to change significantly after the Second World War, when a new emphasis was placed on mass mobilization in education as a means of softening the blow of mass demobilization of millions of fighting men. The GED was created to enable many of them, who had not graduated high school, to take an equivalency, and the idea quickly spread that high school graduation (or equivalency) should be universal. This idea, intersecting with social justice movements focused on access for previously excluded populations, fundamentally altered perceptions of the purpose of the school system―a reform reaching its crescendo with the Education for All Handicapped Children Act (now known in a revised form as the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act) in 1975, which made special education programs mandatory and, in the process, ensconced the principle among educators that their mission was to ensure the ability of all students to remain engaged in the system as long as possible. The mission of a school was thus transformed from sifting students and determining their abilities and potential suitability for various kinds of vocation to ensuring that no one ever fails—an idea now so dominant that it actually named the centerpiece education bill of the last thirty years, No Child Left Behind.
Once again, there is no one-size-fits-all solution to anything in education. These changes have enabled the participation of many students who had been wrongly excluded and who have greatly benefited by their inclusion. Nonetheless, this basic shift in educational philosophy, undertaken with a totalizing lack of nuance, has demonstrably eroded the standards of public education to the point that it is now a truism that our high school graduates could not pass the eighth grade exit examinations once taken by those “drop-outs” (who did not so think of themselves and were not so stigmatized at the time) that once took working papers and left the system. It is this change in conceptualizing the mission of our schools that permits my functionally illiterate high schoolers to continue to matriculate grade after grade and ultimately receive a diploma (and which, incidentally, makes that diploma so worthless as a guarantee of ability that students wishing to go on to jobs that used to require only a high school education now have to plunge themselves into tens of thousands of dollars of debt to obtain a college degree).
Broad-based literacy is a necessity of societies where large amounts of intellectual labor have to be performed by significant swathes of the population. By this I don’t just mean classically “thinking professions”, but demanding intellectual tasks more broadly. With the advent of industrialization came a need for ordinary people to routinely consult timetables, for example, which were novel in a society where most people had formerly approximated times of day based on the position of the sun. The displacement of huge numbers of people from the countryside to the cities in an age before the telephone prompted a massive surge in letter writing (most modern postal systems come from this time) and also led, in conjunction with the expansion of business interests to a level of international operations never before achieved on such a scale, to the development of modern mass media news services, which informed people in the country as to the happenings in the cities their relatives had gone to, and people in the cities as to what was happening in the colonies that their businesses depended on. Many more examples could show how processing large volumes of written information in a variety of forms became a task repeated, on large scales and small, by ordinary people dozens, or hundreds, or thousands of times per day.
What networked computer systems have done is to automate and outsource a large number of these processes. An app on your phone spits your train’s departure time out when you speak into it. There is no longer a need for you to consult or decode the whole timetable. News aggregators sift reams of newspapers to bring the narrow selection of things you are interested in. Consequently, you no longer skim the same diversity of information trying to find what you want. Computers now do much of the information sorting and retrieval that the ordinary person’s brain was once taxed for.
Jamaica’s literacy rate is still below 90%, despite nearly a century of determined government efforts to increase it. Why? Because the government’s literacy program had extremely unfortunate timing, pushing a predominately oral culture to become literate at the very same moment that the radio was introduced. Once upon a time, in villages all over the island, the one literate person in town would go out into the square on a Saturday morning and read the paper to everyone. Suddenly, in the 1920s and 1930s, the radio put a designated reader in homes all over the island. the incentive to read did not disappear, but it was greatly reduced.
Those of you who are hip to what the kids are up to these days may have noticed that the blogging of the 1990s and 2000s has been slowly giving way to “vlogging”, with YouTube becoming a place of conversation and exchange of ideas through extended self-recorded discourses on various topics. It has to be remembered that, like the Jamaica of a century ago, all cultures were once purely oral cultures and remained predominately oral for most of history. That is a natural condition of human society and where the technology (broadly conceived) of that society permits the continuation of orality, it will likely remain in that condition. The advent of multimedia recording significantly decreased incentives to read and write (consider how the telephone impacted letter writing, and the phonograph destroyed a formerly widespread capacity to read music). The advent of easy capture and transmission of those recordings has simply intensified this process.
“What about texting?” someone will surely exclaim. “The kids still do that, don’t they?” Yes, yes they do, but it is a format that works in short bursts of information and is primarily engaged in the discussion of correspondingly simple ideas (like most social media… think Twitter). Hence, it does not significantly engage abilities to follow extended arguments or to analyze complex textual structures or forms, which are skills essential to the kind of functional literacy that makes long-form articles, essays, and books accessible to a reader. (Besides, dear questioner, have you ever actually tried to read a text from someone under 30?)
A successful reinvigoration of functional literacy in our society would thus require either a social revolution in education or the collapse of much of our modern technological infrastructure (neither of which is especially likely to happen without the other). Conversely, both the success of experiments in universal basic income (on the social side) or the development of true artificial intelligence (on the technological side) would guarantee its permanent waning. In that case, H.G. Wells will have proved remarkably prescient in a book that no one will read anymore (…I said, linking to a YouTube clip from the 1960 film).
There’s a Sheep Loose in the Lane
Every week, I help high schoolers with their research projects. I watch them take the assignment, type its prompt questions exactly into Google, and then copy-paste the answer from the search result preview box into their slideshow/paper/spreadsheet. They evince no awareness of whether the text they are plagiarizing is thematically compatible with what they have already copied, or even whether it is grammatically consistent with the previously stolen sentence. On those rare occasions when it does dawn on them that what is in the box may not be what they need, they look at me like I’ve started speaking Welsh when I actually click through to follow a link to a website, or try to explain to them how they can skim through that page to find a relevant section by looking for keywords (precisely the job they use Google to do for them). The moment we leave that preview box, they are utterly lost.
I know why they are, too, because every week I sit in meetings with teachers talking about how “everything is on the Internet now” and “anything they need to know they can just look up on Google,” and why, in consequence, we need to shift our focus from teaching them “mere” facts to focusing on “critical thinking skills” and the ability to “evaluate sources”. The trouble is that, as Carl Hendrick has recently written in an essay that absolutely everyone in education should be forced to read with their eyelids peeled back, decades of psychological research has shown that there are no such things as generic “critical thinking skills” abstracted from subject-specific knowledge contexts. Cognitive abilities developed in one domain or in one activity do not automatically translate into other areas. Champions of Pi memorization competitions are no better at memorizing long strings of letters than a random person on the street.
The further trouble is that the “evaluation of sources” depends ultimately on being able to judge claims against prior background knowledge. Our present focus on source evaluation is, ironically, being rapidly rendered obsolete by the same digital information culture that prompted it in the first place, as the widening availability of ever more sophisticated tools in both desktop publishing and web design makes it increasingly easy to imitate the appearance of professional sources. Thus, we are pushing students with less and less facts at their disposal to trust more and more in traditional indicators of source reliability at the very same time that we are witnessing a massive proliferation of so-called “predatory publishers“. These academic scams work by convincing trained scholars that they are legitimate sources, and thus persuading them to submit papers and to pay for open access publication. What is more, these sources are increasingly showing up as citations in legitimate research (they are open access, after all), threatening the integrity of the whole academic chain. How do they eventually get found out? A specialist in the field perceives discrepancies in their facts, which my fact-starved students could never hope to notice.
Simply put, we are producing an entire generation powerless to detect rapidly proliferating academic fraud and “fake news”, and arming them only with extensive training in general cognitive and critical thinking skills that our research shows do not actually exist.
On the purely quantitative level of the sciences, there can be said to be such a thing as “progress”. We are, collectively, more knowledgeable about the processes of the material world and more skilled at the manipulation of our physical environment than any generation to precede us (and, not coincidentally, more in danger of catastrophic environmental failure than any generation to precede us). In the qualitative realms of the humanities, however, human nature is enduring and the limits of its reconfiguration are narrow. In education, as in politics or philosophy, there are changing fashions, but nothing truly to be known that was not known a thousand years ago. The best preparation for our students in this rapidly shifting age of Google is still classical—a foundation of many years’ training in grammar (which to the ancients meant not just the rules of language, but the raw facts that formed the basis of understanding in any field). This, as cultures from first century Gaul to fifteenth century Mesoamerica recognized, is an indispensable preparation for the critical discipline of logic that engages new data to solve new problems, as well as for the subtle art of rhetoric that unmasks fallacies and sophistry.
To so many progressive educators of the past hundred years, the nineteenth century’s drone of Windsor-knotted elementary schoolers reciting Latin conjugations seemed little more than the bleating of imperial sheep. Thinking to free such pupils from their pen, the reformers pulled out their sledgehammers and knocked out the posts. I can’t help but feel, though, as I watch my high schoolers in the computer lab today, that what the progressives thought was Pink Floyd’s wall was actually Chesterton’s fence.
APCs and the Independent Scholar
As Katie Shamash says in her recent review of the impact of article processing charges on libraries, “We’re part way down the road to open access.” This road has been long and perilous, and like most roads leading to terrible unintended consequences, paved with good intentions.
The dream of open access academic publishing has been to facilitate scholarly communication and open its channels to wider participation. Subscription charges to academic journals were (correctly) identified as one of the major barriers to participation in research and targeted for elimination. It is a testament to the goodwill and energy of many in academia, publishing, and the tech industry that massive quantities of research and other data are now freely available in ways that could not have been conceived only ten or twenty years ago.
Research, however, is not free to produce, and so can never be truly free to distribute. If the cost of its production isn’t being made up at the consumer’s end in subscription fees, it gets made up at the producer’s end in article processing charges (APCs), paid by the author of an article to secure its publication. This model is called “gold” open access, and represents an ever growing share of the total academic publishing market. As gold open access has grown, APCs have grown also. As Shamash notes, “The current average APC is £1,737, up over £100 from £1,632 in 2013.”
Most of the analysis has revolved around the problems this poses for libraries, with budgets not keeping up with inflation being spliced in the midst of the open access transition, still having to shell out for subscription costs to journals on the old model while also coming up with money for APCs. This is because most universities have treated APCs as an institutional cost to be funded out of the budgets libraries already held for securing access to research through subscriptions. It costs over 1700 quid to see your article in print but, if you hold a tenured post, that doesn’t come out of your pocket.
An ever-increasing number of faculty are adjuncts, however, with slight and shifting connections to the institutions that employ them. Fully 76% of all instructional positions in the US are now contingent. These are people who, as Lee Hall writes, are generally not even included in faculty meetings, let alone covered for their APCs out of the university’s research budget. I know many of these people personally; they are my fellow members of the National Coalition of Independent Scholars (NCIS)—a mutual aid association for all of us clinging to the margins of the academic community. The NCIS struggles along on the donations possible from people working multiple jobs to make, generally, less than $30,000 a year. Every once in a while, we manage to toss someone a couple hundred dollars to help get them to a conference. We certainly can’t cover 1700 pounds sterling a piece to help them get published.
For an ever-increasing share of the academic community—indeed, a share that quadrupled between 1975 and 2011 and has been growing quickly ever since—gold open access is a cone of silence. It is a door slamming in our faces, scattering the pages of our carefully researched articles all across the floor of hallways in colleges that will not hire us for even two to three thousand dollars a class unless we can show publication credits and engagement in research, but which will never pay to help us publish that research, no matter how long we serve or how many students we take on. It is a new kind of gap, strikingly parallel to the digital divide, which increasingly makes the generation of knowledge, and with it the opportunity to define the terms of our societal conversations on a plethora of issues, an exclusive province of an ever-shrinking élite.
What is the answer? I don’t know yet (green open access has its own issues). All I know is that I will keep looking, but also that, when I do find a solution, I won’t be able to afford to let anyone know.