book study school district book called drive

Only certain types of books are considered to contain worthy ideas. In this view, intellectualism demands effort therefore, reading romance novels is not considered an intellectual endeavor. What is necessary for the librarian, is that his or her intellect be focused on library concerns” (p. Keeping up with the news or the latest best sellers is not equivalent to a liberal education. In an article on anti-intellectualism and librarianship, David Isaacson (1982), for example, expressed this view when he declared that “it is not sufficient even that a librarian be well-informed.

8)īeyond a correspondence between books and ideas, it is often implied that only certain types of books are considered to be intellectual. As a consequence, those who read widely in a field are more likely than others to make a significant contribution to that field. Finally, reading provides entry to the intellectual forum in which scholarly dialogue takes place. People who are concerned with ideas (i.e., those with academic interests) must frequently encounter text in order to compare and contrast their ideas with those of others. Since text is such an efficient means of storing ideas, it is the medium most often used for that purpose. Second, reading provides access to content that is available nowhere else. Readers tend, therefore, to be more reflective and more critical than nonreaders. First, reading is, by its nature, an intellectual act, requiring the reader to reflect on what is written and construct meaning from it. Their characterization of the intellectual life of teachers is worth quoting at length as it provides a succinct overview of why reading is considered to be of paramount importance when discussing intellectualism:įor several reasons, measures of teachers’ reading are appropriate indicators of their scholarly interests. schools, Aimee Howley, Edwina Pendarvis, and Craig Howley (1993) discuss what they perceive as a lack of intellectualism among teachers by focusing on their reading habits, noting that care for intellect “involves attention to the thinking subject, the minds of students, and equally important our own minds as those who care for students” (p. In an article on anti-intellectualism in U.S. In Peters’ formulation, there is no gap between the ideas that he’s taken an interest in and the books that contain them. I don’t know what sparked my interest in ideas. For example, in his article “Anti-intellectualism is a virus,” Michael Peters (2018) writes about a book he read in childhood: “It was the second book I had read and I was 15-16 years old at that stage!. Because there is a taken-for-granted correspondence between reading books and the life of the mind, research on intellectualism often focuses on how much individuals read. The book plays an outsized role in intellectual life. Efforts to remove certain books from schools are rooted in a strong belief in the power of books to introduce people to new ideas and to change their minds.

Book study school district book called drive