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The Grinch Who Stole Book Fair [1]

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Date: 2022-08-17

I must express my grief here. By way of a short introduction, I was brought up in a very disadvantaged household (how poor we were I never knew as a child) but was blessed with hyperlexia. I read everything. My mother still occasionally tells the story of me reading MAD Magazine and laughing at the jokes . . . at age three.

I read everything. These were the days before cell phones, before personal computers, even (for most folks), so my parents bought me audiobooks before I had literacy. Books on record! On record. I distinctly remember “reading” Mickey and the Beanstalk as a toddler, and so does the rest of my family, because the LP had little grooves where I had put the disc in my mouth and began using it to soothe myself while teething.

I grew up in a very isolated area, very rural, and was bused way out of my neighborhood in order to attend school. I didn’t know it at the time, but those district lines were drawn in the wake of Brown v. Board. I was sent off as a poor Black child to a decently well-off majority (i.e., White) school district; I didn’t have much going for me. But I was a reader, and that became my ticket to success.

When I was a child, the main thing I wanted in the house was a set of encyclopedias. I loved going to the school library and flipping through those, because they contained real facts about the world, all arranged in order, all just waiting for a person to come along and read up on it and absorb all of that information. The problem with reference books in the school library was that you could not check them out to take them home.

My neighborhood, being rural, didn’t have its own library. In fact, if I really wanted to visit the nearest one, my parents would have had to drive me 45 minutes “into town”. The school library was not only necessary, a place upon which I depended; it was also a godsend, a sanctuary. In third grade students were allowed to begin checking out materials, and by fourth grade I was checking out twenty books at a time. Just ridiculous stacks.

Also, there were two great times of the school year, among others: Santa’s Workshop, which was a traveling little trinket merchant that would set up shop every winter in the library so that schoolchildren could take time out to pick out gifts on their very own; and the Book Fair, set up in the same area of the library. Front and center, books on display. It was awesome to be excused from class to trundle down to the library and possibly pick out books to take home permanently. It was great.

Not that we could afford to participate in such things. Like I say, my family was poor. I qualified for free lunch, where I’d have to go to the office every week and get a little perforated card of tickets, and every day I would tear one of those tickets off for a lunch. So it wasn’t common for me to be able to splurge at the Book Fair. But it was a treat to just stroll through the display area and to flip through fresh pulpy paperbacks.

Scholastic Books were also something that I couldn’t really afford, but the excitement was there nonetheless. The teacher would pass to each row of students a stack of wispy brochures—order forms, really—for Scholastic offerings. I would sit and circle my prospective picks as though I were going through the Sears catalogue: very serious in my discernment. But also thrilled! Because there was the possibility that those books could be mine, even if just in a fantasy.

As an adult who now receives plenty of books through the mail, due to my sheer love of reading; as someone who once worked in a public library and who knows the joys both as a patron and a page; as someone whose identity was shaped by books and by a love of the English language, I am distraught that the children of Florida will be denied the joy of being encouraged to read (that is almost as bad as active discouragement). They will not be able to utilize in-school library checkout to read on their own. They will not be able to expand their horizons and order books on their own.

This is a form of inhumanity. Children learn most critically through age 5, but all of childhood is tender. As this Sprouts video states,

(cued to 1:35)

The cognitive neglect often led to lower IQ scores, delayed language development and a lack of creative thinking. This happens because our brains build connections with every new experience and stimulation. If there are no rich experiences during the first few years of life—the period in which the brain develops the fastest—children cannot build the foundations necessary for optimal future learning. They miss out for life.

And when it comes to children, instilling a love of reading can’t come soon enough. For those kids who are being raised, as I was, in a disadvantaged home, they are being denied the opportunity to make up for the deficiencies at home due to income. Those children who are disadvantaged will continue to lag behind their better-equipped peers, those whose families have more money, and isn’t that DeSantis’ real motive? Doesn’t he mean to enforce a structural disadvantage?

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/8/17/2117237/-The-Grinch-Who-Stole-Book-Fair

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