Are school librarians responsible for the re-election of Trump?

‘Brain rot’ is defined as “the supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging. Oxford University Press, Dec 2, 2024 Oxford Dictionary 2024 Word of the Year

Librarians of my generation were trained to function in a world of print information sources - old fashion things like books, magazines, newspapers, and vertical files. A large part of our professional training involved learning how to select quality resources for our collections and how to weed out those which had become dated.

Our students (and teachers) had little need for information evaluation skills themselves when I started teaching in the 1970s. We librarians made sure they only had access to the good stuff. Maybe not a heck of a lot of it, but what we had in functioning libraries could be trusted.

Of course our students and staff (and ourselves) started getting access to the Internet (Internet was capitalized in those days) in the early 1980s and the horse was out of the barn when it came to information reliability. One of the earlier and more controversial websites was Wikipedia.  "Just anyone could write or edit an encyclopedia entry? The horrors!" A professor at Minnesota State University, Mankato designed a fake Mankato City webpage as a tool to teach people not to take Internet information at face value. (Mankato actually had tourists visit expecting to see its Great Pyramid.) Many of my articles and columns examined the need for increased information literacy. (See “Survival Skills for the Information Jungle,” Creative Classroom, Sept 2001 for example.)

Information professionals also warned early about something we called "ego-casting.” With a large selection of information sources, one could pick and choose only those in which one was interested or with which one agreed. It was an early view of what social media and cable news now makes so easy - and popular.

But such warnings went unheeded. Despite advocating for good information literacy skills, it seems that a large percentage of the US population still does not critically analyze the information they find online and gives credibility to only those sources to which they are politically aligned, leading many voters to choose candidates whose policies may not be in their economic or social best interests.

So, does the 2024 election prove that we as school libraries did not do our job - or not do it well enough? After 30 years of Internet access, have we still not gotten the message across to our students, to our teachers, to the public they need to be critical information consumers? If so, I feel great responsibility, having been considered a leader (or should I now say influencer) in the field for many years.

I can only hope the next generation of librarians is more effective than we were.

Comments

[Floyd Pentlin]

I think there is lots of guilt to go around, but certainly librarians have been sounding the alarm for a long time. Was part of the problem that librarians did not have enough gravitas and were not taken seriously enough outside our own (insular?) profession to have our warning message significantly adopted by the greater educational and parental communities?

The concern has now increased in manifold ways with AI gleefully manufacturing information on a grand scale.

[Doug Johnson]

Hi Floyd,

Good question about the need of librarians for more "gravitas." I don't' think many took their role in teacher staff development and administrative awareness seriously enough (or perhaps had enough time to do these things.) My title was meant to be provocative, not accusatory. There is plenty of blame to go around for educational shortcomings in this country.

Hope all is good in KC!

Doug