Day: June 16, 2025

American steel tycoon Andrew Carnegie donated over $40 million to construct 2,509 libraries—1679 in the US and others in the UK, Ireland, Canada, and even distant countries like Serbia, Malaysia, and Fiji. By 1919, nearly half of the 3,500 libraries in the United States were Carnegie libraries. “A library outranks any other one thing a community can do to benefit its people,” said Carnegie. “It is a never failing spring in the desert.”

By contrast, from the fall of Rome to Nazi Germany to Mao’s Cultural Revolution, the dismantling of libraries has been a mark of cultural decline. It demonstrates an indifference, if not hostility, toward the intellectual needs of society.

Yet today, an increasing number of schools are defunding, closing, or repurposing their libraries under the banner of “progress” and “innovation,” and under the false assumption that libraries are just rooms full of books which can be found online or stored in a cheaper or more convenient location. For example, in June, the school board in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania, eliminated funding for middle and high school library books from next year’s budget. Waiākea High School in Hilo, Hawaii, is now converting its library into a health education center for careers like nursing and physical therapy. Some of its 26,000 books and other materials are being moved to a spare classroom, while the rest are being donated to the community.

In a case that drew the ire of many, even the mayor of Houston, a June 2024 photo from Houston Independent School District (HISD) showed all the furniture in one elementary school library newly rearranged for the coming year. The bookshelves were pushed up against walls and windows, often blocked from reach by other furniture, to make room for row after row of individual desks. It was part of the new superintendent’s “New Education System,” under which HISD school libraries were turned into “team centers” housing disruptive students removed from class for disciplinary reasons.

At an HISD hearing on the issue, one Wheatley High School student protested the change: “I live in Fifth Ward. There’s not a lot there [in the school library], but what is there should not be turned into a [team] center, especially when I am constantly there. I read a lot, and I just feel like that is not what needs to happen.”

The student’s words, “I am constantly there,” speak volumes about the value of libraries. “Constantly” and “there” indicate time and place. A library is a fortress guarding time and space for the exploration of books from intrusions. Libraries are among the real “safe spaces” schools need. Houston ISD says it now allows students to access books on a phone app, as if this were an adequate substitute. But a phone is not a reading space, and it steals time by embedding the act of reading in a world of distractions.

To be sure, many school libraries today are underutilized. In a vicious cycle, as schools allot more funding to digital resources, libraries’ book collections often diminish, which only amplifies the impression that libraries are unnecessary. The answer, however, is not for administrators to shrug their shoulders and give up on school libraries. It is to find creative ways to improve them and attract students to them again, just like successful cities find ways to bring people back to underutilized downtown areas.

The good news is that some schools are doing this. The Laura Bush Foundation for America’s Libraries has awarded 4,000 grants totaling $23 million to expand, update, and diversify the book and print collections of low-income schools across the US. (Bush was an elementary school librarian in Austin, Texas, and has a master’s in library science.)

And many schools are transforming their library spaces. For example, in 2019 New York City Public Schools started the VITAL (Vital Instructional Transformative Accessible Learning) Libraries grant program, funded by the Edith & Frances Mulhall Achilles Memorial Fund, which awards two $50,000 one-time grants each year for schools to develop a sustainable model to make the library an essential resource in the school that is integrated with students’ experience. One long-term goal of the VITAL grants is to create a community of stakeholders who will ensure that the school library program is not dismantled. At one grant recipient, Curtis High School on Staten Island, this stakeholder community includes such diverse members as a parent coordinator, assistant principals, custodians, and the school’s robotics teacher.

In another New York City Public Schools project, in the early 2000s, the Robin Hood Foundation’s Library Initiative helped fund the construction and overhaul of libraries in some of the city’s poorest elementary schools. It enlisted dozens of architects and graphic designers, who turned dilapidated libraries into vibrant central spaces.

Schools are using many strategies to attract students to their libraries, some innovative, others tried-and-true. One is to allow students to have more input. This can include allowing students to make book requests, obtaining the books quickly, and having library “brand ambassadors” who generate ideas for the book collection, selections for the book club, and future events and programs. KC Boyd, the 2022 School Library Journal School Librarian of the Year, keeps the bookshelves dynamic by rearranging them regularly. Librarians can prominently display books connected to current class topics and projects, which requires communication with teachers. The librarians at Fauquier High School in Virginia run “book tastings” in which students rotate from table to table sampling books of different genres using a five-minute timer. And some libraries are hosting events for reading literature or original poetry, or adding podcast recording spaces and makerspaces with supplies.

From a design standpoint, many school libraries have added artwork, like murals and sculptures, and comfortable, all-mobile furniture. Some have put high-traffic offices, like the student activities office, nearby, so students must pass through the library to get there. And many school libraries have seen student use skyrocket after changing to a “learning commons” model, which designates separate zones for classroom space, quiet study, and collaboration with “team tables” and laptop charging stations. Librarian Rebecca Webster of Fauquier High School in Virginia says, “After COVID especially, students forgot how to talk to each other,” so she loves seeing students talking at the team tables. Her fellow librarian, Becca Isaac, says, “Before, [the team areas] might have been the ‘shushing zone,’” but redesigned partitioning allows students seeking conversation and quiet to coexist.

Perhaps the most fundamental way to attract students to school libraries is to have a friendly, helpful librarian who knows students by name. But many are disappearing. For example, in Massachusetts, a recent article reports that the New Bedford School District has 13,000 K-12 students but only one librarian, who works at New Bedford High School. None of the district’s eighteen elementary or middle schools has a librarian, making it a “librarian desert.”

Good librarians can change lives. As Leah Gregory of the Illinois Heartland Library System puts it in a 2023 article, “A school librarian can turn a resolute non-reader into a voracious reader by suggesting a magical book that converts them. It’s a miracle that happens regularly in school libraries, but it requires a staff member who has the time to build a connection, a collection to pull from, and the skill to do reader advisory.”

Sometimes, all it takes to get students looking at books in the school library is someone taking them there and pointing out interesting examples of what is available. For example, a decade ago, I was teaching geography at community college, and I had assigned a project to research and design a trip to another part of the world. The instructions required at least ten sources, including three books. “Three?” students said, as if this was way over the top. A few weeks later, one piped up that they had been to the college library and found it contained no books about Mozambique, their destination, nor about Africa in general. Skeptical, after class, I strolled down to the library and found a long bookcase filled with books about Africa, with many sections on Mozambique. It was then that I realized how little experience some students have with finding books in a library, rather than just using it to chat and work on their laptops. So I collaborated with the librarians to set up mini-field trips to the library in which we showed the students where they could find books on every inhabited region of the world. Over the rest of the semester, I found myself bumping into my students in the library, looking for books for their project.

There are also schools that never had a library to dismantle. “I have never worked in a school with a functional school library,” wrote Philadelphia public school English teacher Lydia Kulina-Washburn in her 2022 Education Week article Book Bans? My School Doesn’t Even Have a Library. “In the absence of school libraries, it is not uncommon for teachers to create private classroom libraries from donations. Like mine in Room 250, these usually take the form of clusters of orange Wawa shelving crates.” If book apps on phones were enough, as an increasing number of school districts seem to believe, why would teachers be scrambling to build physical libraries in their classrooms?

A US Department of Education study found that 61 percent of low-income families with kids had zero books for children in the home. This often leaves it to school libraries to introduce students to the world of books. But the current trend of closing, shrinking, and repurposing school libraries robs many students of the opportunity to discover and love books. Moreover, it stands in stark contrast to America’s long history of finding innovative ways to connect people with books and spaces to explore them.

For example, the concept of a bookmobile—a library on wheels—was invented by an American librarian with the mind of a social entrepreneur. In 1902, Mary Lemist Titcomb became head librarian at the Washington County Free Library in Hagerstown, Maryland, which had just opened the year before as only the second county library in the US. It was there that Titcomb started a book outreach service which sent boxes of 30 books each to some 66 “book stations” located in stores, post offices, and other public places. But she realized that the books still were not reaching many rural dwellers. So she enlisted Joshua Thomas, a janitor at her library who lived in a rural area, to drive a horse and buggy full of books out to the countryside. Her instructions were to make sure families have enough time to browse and enjoy the books. “The book goes to the man,” said Titcomb, “not waiting for the man to come to the book.”

During my own early childhood in the DC suburbs, our area’s bookmobile was a library in a truck. It would roll in each week during summer and park for an hour at the entrance to our townhouse development. The driver-librarian would open the doors, and I would step up and scour the shelves from microscopes to baseball fundamentals to the Sioux Indians to Frog and Toad and Encyclopedia Brown. At the end of the hour, I would step back down onto the sidewalk and walk home with a big stack of books in my arms, and the bookmobile would roll on to the next stop.

Long before Mary Lemist Titcomb invented the bookmobile, many of America’s Founders also worked extensively to build and support libraries. For example, in 1731, a 25-year-old Ben Franklin and his philosophy club, the Junto, founded the Library Company of Philadelphia, the first public library in what is now the United States.

Thomas Jefferson allowed friends and the public to use his library at Monticello in Virginia, where he amassed between 9,000 and 10,000 volumes. It was the largest personal book collection in the early United States. Jefferson inherited some of his books, while others he obtained through book dealers in Georgetown, Washington, DC, New York, and Philadelphia. And he procured many books during his five years in Europe as America’s Minister to France. He sailed home to Virginia with trunks full of books from across Europe. In 1814, after the 3,000 volumes in the Library of Congress were lost when the British burned the US Capitol building, Jefferson more than doubled the size of the library by selling the government 6,487 of his own books. They were left in their original bookcases, which were put into ten horse-drawn wagons and hauled 300 miles from Monticello to DC. Jefferson described the collection he sent in a letter to his friend Samuel Harrison Smith, DC’s most prominent journalist and newspaper owner:

I have been 50. years making it, & have spared no pains, opportunity or expence to make it what it is. [W]hile residing in Paris I devoted every afternoon I was disengaged, for a summer or two, in examining all the principal bookstores, turning over every book with my own hands … [and] during the whole time I was in Europe, in it’s principal book-marts, particularly Amsterdam, Frankfort, Madrid and London, [I searched] for such works relating to America as could not be found in Paris. … and after my return to America, I was led to procure also whatever related to the duties of those in the high concerns of the nation.

When the final shipment left Monticello for DC, Jefferson wrote to Smith, “Our 10th and last waggon load of books goes off to-day. … [And] an interesting treasure is added to your city, now become the depository of unquestionably the choicest collection of books in the US. and I hope it will not be without some general effect on the literature of our country.”

What Jefferson, Franklin, Titcomb, and Carnegie all understood was the value of putting books in people’s hands. Too often today, centuries of work are being reversed by misguided initiatives that shrink the distribution of printed books. A 2024 article in Publisher’s Weekly reported that “In 2022 there were 162 million fewer books on US library shelves than in 2010, a roughly 20% decline.”

On the other hand, in 2021, six Congressmen from both houses introduced the Build America’s Library Act, which would provide $5 billion to build and upgrade libraries in underserved communities across the country. And the exploding classical school movement centers on daily reading and discussion of great books. These developments are in step with Americans’ long history of finding innovative ways to connect people with books.

Backward cultures find reasons to dismantle libraries. Wise, flourishing cultures find ways to build and expand them. Rather than using new technology as an excuse to downsize and repurpose libraries, we can better use it to orchestrate funding and logistics to expand school library collections and design and improve library spaces. Anyone donating to schools should recognize that school libraries are often an endangered species and consider stipulating that their donations are for the maintenance and expansion of libraries—especially ones on the brink of extinction. The real progress lies in creatively improving school libraries and educating students about what they have to offer, turning deserts into springs once again.

One of the “founding fathers” of the European Union, Jean Monnet, famously said, “Europe will be forged in crises, and will be the sum of the solutions adopted for those crises.” The most serious crisis occurred in 2009–10, the eurozone crisis, which put in jeopardy the common currency shared then by 12 EU countries. The euro survived, although no other EU countries have adopted it since, even if they are obligated to do so. Other major challenges have involved terrorism, immigration, the challenge of populism, and now the defense of Europe against Russian aggression without the assurance of American backing. This seems to be the greatest crisis yet. 

The European Union has both boosters and critics, but, given the threats of China, Iran, and Russia, and the failed or failing countries in Africa, it is in everyone’s best interest if the EU succeeds, though that may well take significant “forging,” to quote Monnet. What it will be in ten years’ time is difficult to predict, but the EU is not going anywhere. 

Though the Federalist Papers were ignored during the genesis of the European Union in the 1950s, and in its evolution since then, they are nonetheless useful as a means of analysis of the EU. Hamilton’s introduction to the Essays, in which he ponders the unique American undertaking, speaks to the EU project as well. Hamilton notes, 

It has been frequently remarked that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.

Hamilton may have overstated the case, given that the colonies already had well over a century of semi-autonomous self-governance as well as the advantage of the English government model. The EU, however, is arguably sui generis, something new, in a category of only one. Perhaps even more than America, it was created in “reflection and choice,” although some might argue that the “reflection” was insufficient. 

Treaties, Black Pots, and Black Kettles

Even though the US was an early proponent of the EU, hoping for a bulwark against the Soviet Union, the EU is the entity that conservatives love to hate; at times, there are even hints of schadenfreude when the EU finds itself facing challenges or crises. The few progressives who pay attention to the EU are in a sour mood as well, but in their case, it is because they think the project is failing. Both George Soros and the New York Times’ Paul Krugman speak of “the tragedy of the EU” insofar as it is falling short of a United States of Europe, largely governed by a supranational government.

To be sure, there is plenty to criticize, although some critics are apocalyptic. Others maintain that the EU was irreparably flawed from the start. At the least, the EU is finding just how difficult it is to acquire a common culture. At times, though, criticisms of the EU remind one of the proverbial “pot calling the kettle black,” an observation that some admit, even if implicitly. American conservatives criticize the EU for its “democratic deficit,” although the phrase is never well defined. To be sure, every democratic country suffers from a democratic deficit, which we might say is the gap between its political ideals and its governance. On our side of the Atlantic, citizen confidence in US institutions is at a disturbingly low level. A widely circulated poll a few years back found that Congress is less popular than a colonoscopy, a root canal, lice, or telemarketers. In the last several elections, American presidents have been elected, not because of who they are, but of who they are not, namely, their predecessor. Our electoral process is suppressing talent and integrity.

Criticized as well is the EU’s expectation that the concept of the nation-state will give way over time to a new system of governance. That expectation, though, seems to be dead in the water, to the disappointment of Europhiles: the nation-state is alive and well. In the US, a destructive ideology of “globalism,” perhaps even more radical than the quest for “ever closer union,” has as its effect the non-enforcement of the country’s southwest border, a devastating act of malfeasance that has only recently been addressed. At best, it will take years to manage. Critics charge that the EU has precipitated cultural decline, evident in religious apostasy, declining birthrates, and the social instability brought about by massive immigration. The US, however, has startled even Europe with its freefall into moral anarchy. Who would have thought it would take a British fantasy author to tell Americans that they are embracing gender madness?

The Lisbon Treaty and Sleeping Beauty

The legal basis of the EU is a series of member country treaties; the European Union was born in 1957 with the Treaty of Rome and now numbers 27 countries. Although the idea of a united Europe has been around for centuries, most admit that the impetus for the modern undertaking was to ensure that Germany did not wreak havoc on the continent a third time. In 1992, the Maastricht Treaty formally recognized the “European Union.” The treaty preamble contains the informal motto of the EU: “ever closer union.” In 2004, the EU produced a “constitution,” or a “constitutional treaty.” It failed, however, to secure the required unanimous approval of all 27 countries. Some of its features were copied into the Lisbon Treaty (2007), which expressed more, though still modest, concern for a common defense.

For years, the EU has enjoyed the luxury of talking about a common defense with nothing to show for it, except an annoyed NATO, which found such EU aspirations redundant, and thus competitive. The Lisbon Treaty, moreover, created the position of High Representative for the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy. Although not the first to occupy the position, Italian Frederica Mogherini assumed the office from 2014–19, though the Eastern European EU countries expressed concern, suspicious that she was too sympathetic with Russia after its invasion of the Ukraine. At an EU summit, Mogherini tried to explain, “European defense has sometimes been seen as synonymous for the creation of a European army. This, however, is not the path chosen by the EU and its member states.” She added dubiously, “What we have built is even more ambitious than a European army.” 

On a more hopeful note, Kaja Kallas, former prime minister of Estonia, has just assumed the position that Mogherini occupied; she seems an apt choice for the role as her family suffered grievously from Soviet-occupied Estonia, in which several immediate family members were deported to Siberia. Kallas has expressed strong public support for Ukraine. 

In December of 2017, the EU established PESCO (Permanent Structured Cooperation). Though it fell far short of a common military, its ambitions did include ancillary services: a Medical Command, a Cyber Rapid Response Team, Military Disaster Relief, and improved Maritime Surveillance. In a rather odd tweet about PESCO in 2017, and hopeful it would create an EU military force, then EU Commissioner Jean-Claude Juncker fancifully announced, “She is awake, the Sleeping Beauty of the Lisbon Treaty.” 

Yet, “the mountains heaved, but brought forth a mouse.” The EU’s common military, the European Corps (Eurocorps), is an army corps whose headquarters number all of 1,000 soldiers, stationed in Strasbourg, France. At least the location is symbolic: the Maginot Line runs less than five miles from the city center. Sleeping Beauty still sleeps, and there is no prince in the offing, though there is a new seriousness, both in Brussels and in member countries, of military spending—even if it means deficit spending. Some of the countries that are derelict in meeting their obligations to NATO, and encouraged by the current president of the EU Commission, have pledged to meet NATO’s 3 percent of GDP, or even more. 

The effort, however, will be uneven; for example, the leftist Spanish government, comfortable behind the Pyrenees, explains that responding to climate change will be a major part of its defensive contribution. In addition, the EU is accelerating the process of adding new members; those candidate countries are in the Western Balkans: Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Serbia (Bulgaria and Croatia are already EU members). In addition, the EU is looking seriously at Georgia, Moldova, and even Ukraine. A notable success of the EU thus far, has been to offer a safe haven to former Soviet Block countries, and several of them provide a buffer between Russia and Western Europe. 

A Political or Spiritual Crisis?

Unlike Americans, who can point to philosophical antecedents from which the country drew inspiration—even if those sometimes self-contradictory antecedents stimulate debate—the EU has studiously avoided political philosophy, perhaps because of overconfidence in rational design, perhaps because of the devastation wrought by Marxism and Nazism, probably a combination of both. Kant’s hyper-rational “Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch” (1795) is somewhere in the background, even if it is not recognized. In trying to explain the EU, a prominent Member of the European Parliament (MEP) once told me that it had something to do with Rousseau’s “General Will,” taken from The Social Contract (1792). He did not seem able to elaborate, although he may have been correct. More apropos might be the thought of José Ortega y Gasset, especially his Revolt of the Masses (1930), although his warning of “hyper-democracy” and his promotion of a ruling elite would have been a hard sell. 

If anything is to unite Europe, and satisfy the quest for a “European identity,” it may be a recovery of its Judeo-Christian heritage. This was debated in a peculiar way in the attempt to write the EU constitutional treaty in Brussels in 2003. The question arose, and was debated for weeks, whether the preamble should include a recognition of Europe’s Judeo-Christian roots. The issue bedeviled the assembly, and when all was said and done, no mention was included in the document; some even worried that it would alienate Muslim immigrants. In 2011, the European Commission recommended to the member countries that citizens find a more “inclusive” holiday greeting than “Happy Christmas.” 

Joseph Ratzinger (Benedict XVI), however, asserts that Europe’s religious heritage is not an irrelevant relic. He addresses the question in The True Europe: Its Identity and Mission, (2024), which was sympathetically reviewed on this site by Paul Seaton. Benedict is, as Seaton titles his review, “A European in Full,” yet his warnings about the future are dire: “European rational law is in a crisis, now that it has completely relinquished its religious foundations and de facto runs the risk of turning into a rule of anarchy.” Ratzinger asserts, “There can be no future Europe that would jettison … the heritage of the Christian West.” “History,” he explains, “cannot be turned back.” In saying this, however, Benedict is not advocating a nostalgic return to a bygone era; he fully embraces the continent as it is today, and it is one, he maintains, in which “Christian faith can coexist and make room for different political positions.” Such an environment will offer “binding force,” which “safeguards a maximum of freedom.” If not, he warns, we will witness a “post-European” society.

Conclusion: Federalist #85

As a bookend to essay #1, in Federalist #85, Hamilton draws on Scottish philosopher David Hume to say that a successful constitution needs time. In the last paragraph of #85, Hamilton quotes from Hume’s “The Rise of Arts and Sciences,” in which the Scottish philosopher argues that, at a certain point, nothing can improve a government other than experience, time, and trial and error. 

The zeal for attempts to amend, prior to the establishment of the Constitution, must abate in every man who is ready to accede to the truth of the following observations of a writer equally solid and ingenious: “to balance a large state or society (says he) whether monarchical or republican, on general laws, is a work of so great difficulty, that no human genius, however comprehensive, is able, by the mere dint of reason and reflection, to effect it. The judgments of many must unite in the work; experience must guide their labor; time must bring it to perfection, and the feeling of inconveniences must correct the mistakes which they INEVITABLY fall into in their first trials and experiments.”

What might a “successful EU” look like? The answer is not an easy one. If we look upon the EU as a nation-state, then a Comparative Government perspective is apt, and one could do no worse than consider the Preamble to the US Constitution and judge the EU by those criteria. If the EU, however, is analyzed from an International Relations perspective, that is, as a kind of international organization, then different criteria might apply: We would hope for an entity with a substantial global presence, in a meaningful alliance with the US and other like-minded countries, and a sturdy member of NATO. Since the EU is its own category, it may be that if it at least satisfies the best of both categories, we might then deem the EU successful.