Episode 26 of FOSIL, Education and School Libraries (recorded on 30 May 2026) is now available: Why does it matter? How do we, as School Librarians, answer this question?.

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Preparatory notes

This episode marks 3 years of an ongoing conversation with Elizabeth in this format, and 15 years since we first met. A central theme of our ongoing conversation has been,

What kind of school library/ian is integral to what kind of educational process?

How we answer this question matters — why?

All schools are public schools, in that they produce a public. The question, then (Postman, 1996), “is not, Does or doesn’t public schooling create a public? The question is, What kind of public does it create? A conglomerate of self-indulgent consumers? Angry, soulless, directionless masses? Indifferent, confused citizens? Or a public imbued with confidence, a sense of purpose, a respect for learning, and tolerance?”

This is why the chief task of education is to guide the evolving dynamism through which a person forms themself as a person (Maritain, 1943). However, in order to make sense of this, we need some understanding of what this evolving dynamism is, as well as the process through which a person forms themself as a person.

The “ultimate freedom we have as human beings is the power to select what we will allow or require our minds to dwell upon” (Willard, 2002). Now, what we will allow or require our minds to dwell upon, is who we are, or are in the process of becoming. This fact is empowering, in that we can determine who we are in the process of becoming by what we choose to think about, or dwell on mentally. This fact is also sobering, in that we must do so, whether consciously or not. This brings the importance and value of our chief task as educators into sharp focus, especially in relation to the mind and the thoughts it thinks.

Willard (2002) continues that “the realm of thought involves four main factors. These are ideas, images, information, and our ability to think, but the two most powerful ones are ideas and images.” More on this next time…

Links/ quotations/ updates:

• Keynote for the UK School Library Association 2021 Conference | Inquiry: An Educational and Moral Imperative (includes links to the IFLA School Library Guidelines and the IFLA/UNESCO School Library Manifesto).
• An article for ACCESS (37:4) | Constructing an Instructional Identity and Destiny From the Stories We Tell and the Songs We Sing.
• Matt Seybold‘s (2026) The American Vandal podcast. “The durability of a totalitarian state depends upon systemic assaults on mass literacy followed by continuous suppression of conditions for its reemergence.”
• FOSIL Group Forum post with links to infographics for Pope Leo XIV‘s (2026) Magnifica Humanitas (Magnificent Humanity): On safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence. | Tolkien/ Gandalf quotation: “It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till.”
• An article for The School Librarian (74:2) | Inquiry: Fundamentally Creative and Fundamental to Creativity.
• SJSU 2026 | ALiVE Library | Teaching Inquiry as Conversation with Barbara Stripling and David Loertscher now includes a link to the recording. Details of the book may be found here.