Literacy

We lack both the vision and the administrative capacity to mine our resources. There is a thread on Anguilla Forum. It consists, as I write this, of three posts enquiring about the possibility of donating children’s books to Anguilla. No one has responded with advice.

There used to be a number of book projects, all uncoordinated with each other.

1. Teacher Art was getting books at the West End School, and sharing them with other schools. He, alas, is gone, and so is the project.

2. A lady in Canada with publisher connections was getting new books for Anguilla. She treated people who were sending down used books as if they were garbage collectors, and wanted nothing to do with their rubbish. I do not know what happened to her project.

3. We used to have an energetic and enthusiastic young national librarian. He is now, to his sorrow, our Labour Commissioner. His replacement is still too new for us to know what sort of vision he has. If he has one, he will not yet have had enough time for his plans to have been put into effect.

4. The Anguilla Community Foundation was providing reimbursement funding for those who sent books via the Post Office’s Home Shopping scheme. They had no rules. The Post Office charge is the same for one book as for a cubic foot of books.Well-meaning people were shipping single used books with a US yard sale value of 10c or 25c, paying postage to Miami, and then the Community Foundation were reimbursing people EC$14.00 for ocean freight. It was a waste of resources, and the initiative soon came to an end.

5. The Seven Seas Cruising Association shipped books to Anguilla. Tropical Shipping donated the ocean freight. A couple of truckloads of good books, mostly for children, found their way to the Library. That project ended successfully.

6. Four years ago, the Rotary Club of Anguilla made an effort to bring in used books from closing-down schools in Canada. The books were rejected by the librarians when they arrived as they were “old and dirty”, ie, they had been previously used. The Club would never attempt such a project again.

Such initiatives sometimes uncover a single donor who provides a massive amount of good stuff. It also sometimes happens that people send all their rubbish to Anguilla, thus adding to our landfill problem at Corito. There is no doubt that care and supervision is needed.

It is the Librarian’s job to co-ordinate this. He could be coerced or insulted into doing this job. But, does he have the staff with the ability to do it right?

This is the tip of a large iceberg of visitors who have a genuine interest in the people of our island, and the means and interest to help in some way, but who don’t know what to do or who to trust. They are an untapped possible source of membership of our voluntary organizations. But, we lack the administrative skills to marshal the potential. None of us outside the tourism sector makes any real effort to communicate with visiting philanthropists who could provide nearly unlimited assistance for the education of our children.

That should not be surprising. If the standard of a country’s public library is a barometer of the nation’s learning, then Anguilla is at the centre of a storm of illiteracy. Our public library’s resources are pathetically inadequate. There are so few paper-based educational and research resources on the shelves that it is a laughable institution.

My Trinidad High School library had the works of Cicero, Josephus and Julius Caesar, of Homer and Plato, the seven surviving plays of Sophocles, the poetry of Dante and Chaucer, the plays of Shakespeare and the poetry of Pope, among many thousands of other “old” and “new” books. By the time I was fifteen, my school-mates and I had dipped repeatedly into the twenty-volume Oxford English Dictionary, the Encyclopedias Britannica and Americana, all while playing and fighting as boys are wont to do. The shelves were over ten feet high. A stepladder was needed for the higher shelves. The works with the rude passages, such as Chaucer, were kept behind lock and key. Not that that was any obstacle for ingenious boys. The books on the top shelves were frequently borrowed, perhaps for the same reason. From Form 1 onwards, every boy had to hand in once a week at an English language class a “book review” or be punished with the removal of privileges.

Check out for yourselves the shelves of the public library of Anguilla. There are very few of them compared with a real library. They are about five feet high, half as tall as they should be. There are very few interesting books on them. The place is mainly used by schoolchildren to hang out in between classes and to get free access to the internet.

Don’t even ask about the library at the High School.

You should not be surprised if I tell you how few of our Form 6 students have the ability to write at a standard above that expected fifty years ago throughout the West Indies of Form 2 pupils.