It seems "Book Week" is now

more about dressing up in a costume than reading a book.  Has this happened because books are not being read any more? 

This morning's editorial is talking about some schools no longer having libraries and there is the inevitable article about "bought" or "home made" costumes. Going to school dressed up as a character in a book is becoming competitive it seems.

I worked in school libraries for a time. I might have stayed there if I had not had the burning desire to see that as many people as possible had a means by which to communicate, that they could read and enjoy books. School libraries were important back then, very important. There was actually a "School Libraries Branch" for the Education Department.  Money was spent on school libraries. 

Other staff thought I was odd because I took just a few snatched minutes to eat a sandwich at around lunch time. It meant I could keep the library open through the lunch hour. It meant the library was over flowing with children almost all the time. Libraries should be like that. 

And "Book Week"? Yes, we had Book Week. It was the week I would talk to the "Mothers' Club" and the School Council about how much the books we had bought were being used and how many more we needed. It was the week I would talk to the young readers about more "book things" as they would call information about how books actually came to be. There was the competition run by the state newspaper where you "wrote a book" and illustrated it. Much of that would be done in the classroom but there would be children lined up in the library to get help from me or older children. The best of these would go up to a big store in the city centre to go on display. There would be author visits to schools. New books would come out just in time for Book Week.

There was not a costume in sight. There was no need for them. The children would draw pictures of their favourite characters and there would be "morning talks" about books they had been reading. There were endless questions around "are there any more like that?"

Half a century later we seem to have lost sight of what a library is in a school. Some schools do not even have libraries. They have become classrooms. The textbooks and any non-fiction material is sought on line. Reading fiction for pleasure? It is still done of course but it is not considered nearly as important any more. 

I am not sure how we expect school students to move to university and do the research of the future if their imaginations have not been stimulated by fiction.  Putting on a shop bought "costume" is not going to help much.