An initiative of the CSSDM librarians recently made the headlines: the Livroooum. A veritable library on wheels, this colorful truck travels from school to school in order to arouse the interest of young people in reading and to fill a real need: in recent years alone, some 20 schools in this service center have lost their libraries. .
In our overcrowded establishments in need of premises, this nerve center is becoming increasingly rare. Many primary schools now have only a deposit of books, in the form of a warehouse or half-class. Not a place of life, of discovery, of learning … A “deposit”, like depositing money, like leaving something there to forget it. A deposit, often so cramped that there is not enough space for a soul to unfold there.
I come from a modest background, in Mauricie. In my mono-industrial town, which had good days in the 1980s, everyone rubbed shoulders with everyone in public elementary school: the children of the director of the pulp and paper mill, those of the workers; the children of a poet (yes, yes) those of the cashiers at People. Located in a turn-of-the-century building next to the church, my school had a low-ceilinged gymnasium, a music room, an art room, and even an incinerator that populated my nightmares. But above all, there was a large bookcase with a well-waxed, shiny beige linoleum floor, which was matched only by the stars in my eyes when I entered this luminous place with its well-stocked shelves.
We went there every week, and some of my memories are still intact. The general rule was to take three books… When I was eight, I had the privilege of taking out seven. I read them all before handing them over. Yes, yes, The Clan of Seven, Ani Croche, Anne in her house of green gables, and books in which you are the hero … I especially remember this place with books classified according to Dewey ratings as an important milieu of life. In particular, we welcomed Paul de Grosbois, who came to introduce us to Flight of dreams. I see myself, sitting at a hexagonal table, pinching myself to be in the company of a novelist. How lucky I was to breathe the same air as those who wrote the books I drank and which had become my bulwark!
A world to save
Identified as gifted, but unaccompanied (the 1980s was not too encumbered with “special needs”), I had unconsciously made these paper worlds my refuge. Every week I walked into the library with a beating heart. My feverishness did not stop when the time came to leaf through books, to discover new universes, to fall in love with an author whose work I was then going to devour in its entirety. The ink pad fascinated me, I watched the librarian’s nimble hand pull down the covers and stamp the due date, almost mesmerized. I dragged my fictitious companions everywhere, and immersed myself in my books in class as soon as my dictation or my math exercise was over. I didn’t chat, didn’t make waves. The books borrowed each week allowed me to get through my primary and secondary school without crying out boredom; they nourished my intellect and stimulated my imagination. They made up for my difference to the point of making me forget it.
The austerity of the various governments has got the better of many of these places over the past three decades. Author and illustrator Hélène Desputeaux, Caillou’s “mother”, was working as a teacher when the slimming treatment began: “The librarian position was eliminated and it was the parents who took care of the library, including dimensions were shrinking like sorrow every year. And the books were classified… by color! “
Biblio-boxer turned biblio-yogi (he introduces himself to the students), Olivier Hamel has been a school librarian for eleven years in the great southwest of Montreal. Voluble, it is like books: it aligns the words at the end of the line without exhausting itself. ” It’s not going well. Documentation technicians hardly exist any more. In my service center, there are two or three left in elementary school. We reduce the hours, we abolish the positions, we entrust the running of the library to the school team or we pay a mother to take care of it.
These incredible volunteers save libraries! They are not formed, but are full of good will. But often they are lost when their children finish primary school. The library then falls asleep again, when it does not disappear altogether … The new schools are equipped with learning centers, spaces where one finds books, but also various technological equipment to stimulate information skills. But, explains the passionate biblio-yogi to me, when they don’t already have a love for reading, young people don’t know what to look for. “We don’t always understand the role of the librarian. We must be in the middle! Work with the teachers. Respond to the real needs of schools. It doesn’t happen in a hidden office or in a centralized education department. “
Books are not a “product” like any other. The logic of the market to which the world of education submits more and more leads to curiosity, which should remain free and free from any socioeconomic imperative. At a time when we are surprised at the low level of literacy of the population and when we tear our shirts over the books we burn, the places that welcome them in schools continue to disappear in a virtual indifference. Olivier Hamel welcomes the initiative of the Livroooum but, according to him, “it would take an army”. For librarians are the guardians of a world that changes lives; which saves some, even. A world that itself deserves to be saved.