IN THE Brigada Eskwela 2016 campaign, the Mandaue City Schools Division identified a need for 156 classrooms for the 5,098 Senior High School (SHS) students anticipated to troop in when classes open on June 13.
According to the May 31 report of Sun.Star Cebu’s Rona Joyce T. Fernandez and Flornisa M. Gitgano, the construction of the bulk of these classrooms will be in July.
In the meantime, Mandaue City public schools will convert non-academic classrooms like libraries and computer laboratories into temporary classrooms.
Dilemma
This directive leaves mixed feelings in educators and reading advocates. As temporary classrooms, will libraries foster a curiosity to open a book that will ignite a love for reading by surrounding students with books and other references?
Many public schools have libraries that remain locked to students, the shelves of books in their pristine state serving as backdrops for school lunches and “merienda (snacks)” hosted for favored school visitors and other VIPs.
Or will these temporary arrangements lapse into permanency, marginalizing books and displacing reading, writing and the imaginary life for other pressing priorities of public education?
The initiative of citizens, the nongovernment and private sector is often the only recourse of public schools to improve their collection of books, magazines, newspapers and other references. To compete for the attention of a generation already too attached to cell phones, computers and the television, a library must have more than empty shelves or nooks stuffed with antiquated, uninviting books.
Citizens and groups should visit their local public schools and consider book donations. In 2014, the Department of Education (DepEd) launched a Library Locator Map, which shows nearly all of the 9,855 school libraries registered with the DepEd, as well as 188 library hubs in schools divisions. The Map helps viewers locate reading centers and learning venues.
There are 100 million Filipinos. If each one takes the DepEd appeal to contribute one new book every year to public school libraries, that’s 100 million new books to stir the love for reading in public students.
Pop-up magic
Stakeholders can also explore innovations to foster a nation of readers and thinkers.
On June 4, Sun.Star Cebu published the Associated Press photo of a pop-up public library in Intramuros. Moving from place to place, the pop-up public library acts as a hub to gather the public to read a book for free, listen to writers and artists, and discuss books with other readers.
Called “The Book Stop,” the project was first featured during the Dia del Libro held by Instituto Cervantes at Makati on April 23. Its next stop was at the Intramuros.
The WTA Architecture & Design Studio, which built the mobile library, said that their goal was to open the concept of libraries by situating this in a public space and moving the project from one place to another.
The pop-up library concept is worth piloting in public schools. While private school students have campus book fairs and bookstore shopping treats, public students rarely have such free and open access to books, even those kept in their own libraries.
The concept of travelling libraries can also be adapted to bringing love for reading to remote schools and communities that are found at the peripheries.
Certainly, libraries are as essential to public education as classrooms and laboratories.