25 July 2000
Good evening ladies and gentlemen.
Thank you very much for inviting me to give a keynote address at this significant occasion. Books and reading are one of my passions.
Allow me to open this event with this quotation:
Where My Books Go
All the words that I utter,
And all the words that I write,
Must spread out their wings untiring,
And never rest in their flight
William Butler Yeats
Given this audience it seems appropriate to open today’s event with the words of Yeats. With lyrical simplicity and an intuitive sense of vision, Yeats beckons us to listen thoughtfully and reflect. The verse is a premonition of an information rich society.
Because of the information revolution that we live in which is characterised by the mass production of information, our society is often referred to as an Information Society or Knowledge Society. The quintessential aspects of this 21st Century Knowledge Society are the rapid rate at which information; factoids and facts are accumulating, and being discarded.
By the time today’s children complete tertiary education, most will be a part of a very different work force. They will be entering an information age that will require them to analyse and interpret information, to present it to others in various forms, and to form opinions and to make judgements and decisions from a wide variety of sources. They will need to be prepared to work co-operatively and productively in flexible ways and be ready to accommodate change in all aspects of life. A new set of basic learning skills will be needed to equip them to live in this changing world.
In essence then our children will need to be information literate – the ability to use information purposefully and effectively.
And to be information literate, our children will need to acquire information skills. To learn these skills learners will need access to resources. The school library is the only central place in the school where learners can interact with a wide variety of resources to learn information skills. School libraries therefore have a very important role to play in helping learners to learn the skills required for survival in the 21st Century.
Unlike in the past school librarians now have a dynamic role of being educators and information specialists in the school. They are a link between learning and information, and key facilitators of unifying education and resources.
The current shifting paradigms in education and information requires an important role for school libraries. The shift in education focus is from teacher/content-centred learning to student/process-centred learning. The shift in the role of the school library is from a storehouse of resources to a dynamic, student-oriented resource-based learning centre where students play an active role in resourcing their own learning.
This shift in worldviews has an important implication for the role of the school librarian into the 21st Century. The role focuses on developing a dynamic and responsive information environment and fostering learners to be active in their learning: - to question, to explore, to seek, to contend, and to create new meaning from information so that they can gain skills necessary to be independent in an information society.
School libraries have therefore the role of bringing together education and information so that students have the understanding, capabilities, confidence and skills vital to surviving in an information society and to being able to make a value-based contribution to this society.
Information and information literacy are at the core of all learning, and therefore central to the education process, whether formal or informal. Information literacy is the essential link between learners and information resources provided by school libraries.
Ladies and Gentlemen: our outcomes-based curriculum aims to meet this challenge. It is resource-based, which means that learners must interact with resources. It asserts that access to information is fundamental to our democratic freedom, to the transformation of our economy, and to the delivery of social justice to all citizens- in other words to our very survival.
Our curriculum recommends that particular attention be paid to the development of an information literacy and skills associated with the use of information, and that these be integrated into curriculum at all levels of education, including teacher education.
What steps are we taking as a Department to meet these challenges of the 21st Century? We have completed A National Policy Framework for School Library Standards and its four-year Implementation Plan. These documents make a series of proposals for the development of standards for school libraries. It also recognises that because of inherited inequities in the provision of libraries in our schools there is unlikely to be much money for developing traditional school libraries in every school. A variety of models for school libraries to choose from and a generic standard to conform to are recommended. Some of the models outlined in the document include:
The suggested policy will therefore be applicable to any type of a school library model. The aim is that learners have access to resources to meet the information needs of the curriculum.
We have also completed A National School Library Survey to give us an indication of how many schools have school libraries and to assist us in implementing the national policy of school library standards. I must say that the results of the survey give a grim picture. [Percentage of schools with a library service per province is as follows:
Eastern Cape 26.7%;
Free State 41.5%;
Gauteng 66.5%;
Kwazulu-Natal 41.8%;
Mpumalanga 39.1%;
North West 44.3%;
Northern Cape 67.9%;
Northern Province 38.2% and
Western Cape 69.2%.
These documents will be released as soon as they are finalised.
We will soon be implementing a READ-USAID Box library project. This project will focus on the provision of box libraries with basic resources for use as a classroom collection. Because of our bilateral agreement with USAID it will focus on four provinces: Kwazulu-Natal, Northern province, Northern Cape and Kwazulu-Natal. Systematic teacher training on how to use the classroom resource collection will accompany this.
Having painted this scenario let me therefore congratulate NAIL for taking the first step towards supporting this initiative of David Phillip Publishers and the Sowetan of providing books to school libraries. The challenge is to others to do the same so that our children have access to resources to enable them to gain the skills that they need to meet the information needs of the 21st Century.
The challenge of providing resources to schools is huge and would require partnerships and joint ventures between a range of role players. These are education departments, local government, business, NGOs and communities. We will all have to form partnerships and have agreements that will ensure the delivery of resources to learners.
Let me leave you with these words as food for thought. When Time magazine (July 3, 2000) recently asked the author, Stephen King, "Will we close the book on books"? His response was "Book lovers are the Luddites of the intellectual world. I cannot imagine them giving up the printed page. Books have weight and texture; they make a pleasant presence in the hand. Nothing smells as good as a new book, especially if you get your nose right down in the binding, where you can still catch an acrid tang of the glue. The only thing close is the peppery smell of an old one. The odour of an old book is the odour of history, and for me, the look of a new one is still the look of the future."
Those who dream of virtual schools and universities and virtual books will have to dream on – their time has not yet arrived.
Ngiyabonga.
Thank you very much.
Hambani kahle.