Disarming the Force of Ignorance: Legalizing Reading to Know

The Secretary of State in Illinois is also the State Librarian who oversees a grant budget that funds literacy projects based in local libraries, churches, and community centers. The current Democratic Secretary of State, Alexi Giannoulias, initiated a legislative effort to stop the erosion of our children’s freedom to read to know by restricting those who would ban books from influencing decisions properly made by a professional librarian. Today the Governor of Illinois is signing a bill banning the banning of books.

The American Library Association has a Bill of Rights for libraries that the State of Illinois takes seriously. The professional prerogative of librarians to do their job now has legal teeth in the state that produced Abraham Lincoln, a quintessential reader with a knack for seeing the big picture. The teeth in the Illinois law grow from restrictions on funding. Libraries that adhere to the American Library Association’s Library Bill of Rights will get money; those that don’t adhere aren’t libraries anyway. The Office of Intellectual Freedom of the ALA published a downloadable brochure in 1983, during the days of the Supreme Court’s Pico decision, which speaks to the rights of student readers when ignorance comes after them.

The first right codifies the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness even as a student in a library. It speaks to the inalienable right to enlightenment of all people regardless of race, creed, sexual orientation, age, or legal status. No child is left behind in a library.

The second right drills down into the first right. To provide resources for all people, dead or alive, current or historical, librarians must apply professional knowledge and expertise to the content of selected materials to decide on its value to the community the library serves, not to decide whether they like it or not, but to consider every patron and stand against paranoia and selfishness of ideologues.

The third right spells out the obligation of the professional librarian to resist those who would deny enlightenment seekers on their path to free and wide ranging knowledge frontiers. This new Illinois law provides governmental protection for librarians serving the interests of all sides of the story. Steven Pico’s optimism for the future of libraries is affirmed by the new law.

Cloud Cuckoo Land, Anthony Doerr’s newest novel, is dedicated to librarians. The narrative spanning 700 years plus a trip to the 22cd century on a survivalist spaceship includes a section set in 1453 Constantinople when a young sultan of the Ottoman Turks conquered the city using the innovation of gunpowder to breach the famous Wall of Constantinople, which had protected the city for 11 centuries. During these centuries denizens of the city collected and archived most of the texts that remain today from the ancient Greeks. We don’t know what we might know had all of the manuscripts been saved. But we do know what we would have missed out on if the librarians of the city had not devoted their lives to libraries.

The Illinois law is an important precedent. In the aftermath of the breach of the walls of civility by Trump’s army, as the forces of disinformation and ignorance rise to assume local authority on school boards, as librarians and teachers face the wrath of supremacists of all stripes, just as libraries in Constantinople withstood natural disasters, fires, and gunpowder to pass on the early work of Homer and his compatriots, our libraries carry on the tradition. Reading to know is in no danger of going dark.