Why I quit as a school librarian Progressive activism is now considered the norm (by Nina Welsch)

 

I can’t pinpoint the exact moment I decided to quit my post as an assistant librarian at a private school, but it was most probably when Andersen Press defended its decision to publish a book intended for under-sevens that contained illustrations of men in fetish gear.

When I saw the book — Grandad’s Pride by Harry Woodgate — on the senior librarian’s acquisitions spreadsheet, to be ordered for June’s month-long Pride display, I quickly alerted them to the scandal. Although, in truth, “scandal” was wishful embellishment on my part. Other than a report on MailOnline, the book’s content didn’t attract great interest in the mainstream media. On the contrary, Woodgate was later a panellist at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, participating in an event about diversity in children’s publishing. Very recently, the book was longlisted for the Little Rebels prize, an award that is “designed to recognise the rich tradition of radical publishing for children in the UK”.

Grandad’s Pride isn’t the only eyebrow-raising nomination I recognised from my time working as a children’s librarian in Scotland. On the Little Rebels longlist was also L.D. Lapinski’s Jamie, a novel I read in one incredulous sitting. It tells the story of Jamie, a child of purposefully undisclosed sex who identifies as non-binary and is faced with the “unjust” decision of whether “they” attend all-boys or all-girls high school. As well as author Lapinski (who identifies as non-binary) portraying Jamie in such a way that makes it seem “they” have no birth sex, the book also contains a deliberate rewriting of the Equality Act that obfuscates the reality of sex to young readers; Jamie asserts “gender” is a protected characteristic under the law rather than “sex” and “gender assignment”.

Grandad’s Pride was the only book I was bold enough to flag, using the minor media coverage of the controversy to present an objective case against adding it to the school library collection. As much as I wanted to, I didn’t express my aversions to Jamie or any of the other — at least 30 — fiction and non-fiction children’s books steeped in unfalsifiable ideology I came across.

Why didn’t I speak out about them all? I’ll confess some of it was timidity. In Scotland at the time, the Gender Recognition Reform Bill was not yet defeated. Plus, I had little authority as the assistant librarian. Within my small department, I was the only one who felt unease about these resources. Perhaps the boiled-frog effect shocked me into stunned silence too. In my first post-university job, in a public library in 2018, I’d witnessed children as young as six being signed up to a summer reading challenge where the form invited them to list their gender “girl”, “boy” or “other”. Back then, it had seemed ridiculous, a brief blip in sanity — an administrative error, even. That blip was now a hydra with heads sprouting everywhere I looked.

This was the real problem. My fight was not with my school library, it was with the whole library sector, and beyond this, the entire world of children’s publishing and bookselling. Activists disguised as children’s authors are not falling through the cracks of publishing — they are being actively promoted and lionised by the industry. It’s extremely hard to make the case that a book is deeply unsuitable for children when major bookshop chains such as Waterstones are singing its praises on their website and media reviews are glowing. Revered children’s authors such as Malorie Blackman and Philip Pullman have lent their support to trans ideology; the few children’s authors who have had the integrity to express concern, including Gillian Philips and Rachel Rooney, have been hounded and cast out.

Not long before I left my library post last year, I attended a webinar on the subject of censorship hosted by the School Library Association (SLA). I had hoped for a robust discussion on censorship from all angles, but there was a notable cognitive dissonance from the hosts. Much of their focus was on the book-banning conflicts going on in US school libraries, where the parents and authorities challenging books were implicitly framed as Christian Right-wingers. Secular parents, reluctant to expose their children to gender or critical race theory, were conveniently grouped in with evangelicals trying to purge Judy Blume and Harry Potter from library shelves. The same webinar also discreetly advised librarians how to ensure they could justify why they might have chosen to “weed” (remove) certain books: for instance, we were told that writing up an (unofficial) library policy is a good way to safeguard against objectors.

Something that dawned on me during that meeting was the demographic of modern school librarians, something I also observed at the 2023 annual conference for the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP). Most were young, progressive women, and perhaps this makes sense: consider the unique mixture of power and nurture librarianship holds; especially in a school library, where you are revered as the moulder of innocent minds, an ambassador for kindness and tolerance as much as literacy. Librarians may not write the books but it is them (us) who decide what books to display and promote, which authors get invited to give talks, and — almost as important — who and what does not get platformed.

Another, perhaps unsurprising, factor in the rise of activist librarianship is social media. Most schools and public libraries have X or TikTok accounts (“Librarians of TikTok” has posted almost 40 million times). A key part of a school librarian’s job is now online PR to show that reading is not only a crucial life skill but also “cool”. I’m not opposed to this: one of my favourite parts of the job was designing funky, enticing book displays and murals to showcase the range of the library collection. However, one of the best ways to get trending is to latch onto viral hashtags and, given that every other day is #SomethingAwarenessDay or someone’s day of “visibility”, the parts of the collection on show end up being heavily steeped in DEI and LGBTQIA+. The old-fashioned image of the librarian as an elderly, stern, technophobic, cardigan-wearer has changed dramatically — the cardigans still exist, except they now come adorned with pronoun badges and progressive slogans. And as with the worrying trends in children’s publishing, none of this is considered radical, it’s simply the new norm.

The flip side of questionable material being marketed to children is the material being hidden from them. Barely 20 years ago, a model librarian strained for utmost political neutrality. Their role was to ensure the efficient and thorough provision of the information members of the public wanted to access, not judgement of it. The 2005 intellectual freedom guidance issued by CILIP stated this clearly: “[Works] should not be excluded on moral, political, religious, racial or gender grounds, to satisfy the demands of sectional interest.”

In contrast, a CILIP guide published in September 2023 about making a public libraries “safe and inclusive” is notably less resolute in tone. There are references to protecting people from (undefined) “hate speech” and “misinformation” as well as librarians “working in a context of a highly polarised society”. With the best will in the world, such nebulous guidance has given the green light to librarians with agendas to act on biases with flimsy justification.

Evidently many are. Only last year, public libraries in a West Yorkshire council area were revealed to have blacklisted a number of “gender-critical” books, including Kathleen Stock’s Material Girls, and were hiding them in stockrooms (they were later reinstated to the shelves but forbidden from being “promoted” on displays). In parts of America, the war on intellectual freedom has progressed from the front desk to the catalogue, where content warnings and deeply biased subject tags are added to databases, making it harder for citizens to access resources that don’t pass the progressive smell test. As with so many cultural trends, it’s a censorious aberration that could easily spread to the UK.

How can we defend against this? The road back to common sense in children’s publishing will be a long and fraught one. But describing the water in which we are drowning is a start. Libraries may be renowned as spaces of quiet, but this is a silence that desperately needs breaking.

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Nina Welsch is a writer and former librarian.

Why I quit as a school librarian - UnHerd

 

What will Europe look like in the future? (by Lionel Shriver)

This year, several articles in mainstream papers have sounded the alarm that the global human fertility rate will soon cross below the point needed to keep the population constant. Anxiety that our species is about to die out seems a bit premature, given that we’re still predicted to add another three billion to the world population before levelling off. Furthermore, these reports always gloss over a key outlier because it undermines the case for our imminent extinction: Africa.

A leading reason that continental Europe is shifting to the political right is popular concern about mass immigration. So I’m putting Europeans and their short-sighted representatives on notice: you folks haven’t seen anything yet.

Forgive the blitz of arithmetic, but these numbers are eye-popping (and thanks to Paul Morland and Edward Paice of the Africa Research Institute and the UN population database). Regionally, Africa’s are the only population projections the UN has steadily been obliged to raise. In 1950, there were 200 million Africans, just over a third of the number of Europeans (550 million). Currently about 1.5 billion, Africa’s population should reach 2.5 billion by 2050 and almost four billion by 2100, when Africans will constitute about 40 per cent of our species, outnumbering Europeans six-to-one.

This is the UN’s ‘medium’ population estimate, which assumes Africa’s birth rate subsides to just below the replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman. But the UN’s ‘high estimate’ envisages Africa’s total fertility rate (TFR) staying above 2.5 and the population rising to 5.4 billion by 2100. By then, some 43 per cent of the world’s under-18s would be African. Demographic momentum would likely ensure the continent’s population keeps growing into the next century.

During the historic fecundity of the 19th century that facilitated colonialism, the European population doubled. In the same length of time, 1950-2050, Africans will have increased by a factor of ten. Eight African countries will have increased by a factor of 15; Niger – where women still average 6.7 children and the population doubled in the past two decades – by a factor of 25.

Experts regard it as inevitable that as poor countries develop, the birth rate drops. But last year, Africa’s TFR was 4.2, sub-Saharan Africa’s 4.6. This fertility rate has barely changed for 70 years. Africa is not getting with the programme.

Take Nigeria, whose population is expected to rise from 225 million now to about 375 million by 2050, vying with the US to become the third-most populous country in the world. Nigeria still has a TFR of 5.1. Twenty years ago, its TFR was 6.0 – so the decrease in family size has been slow. Yet half the country lives in extreme poverty, one of the highest rates on the continent.

Are elevated birthrates simply due to inadequate provision of contraception? Probably not. For example, in West and Central Africa in 2015, women averaged 5.5 children. But they undershot their desired family size by half a child. They’d rather have had six. Most Africans don’t accidentally have big families. They want big families.

Some 42 per cent of sub-Saharan Africa is under the age of 15. (The same is true for 16 per cent of Europeans: our young are now outnumbered by our elderly.) Africa’s child population is growing faster than the ability to teach them (‘Low-quality teaching is a huge problem and getting worse,’ says the World Bank). Ethiopia’s wealth may have doubled in the past ten years (from a low base) but almost half its population remains illiterate and 40 per cent of its children still don’t complete even primary education.

Neither can the continent keep up with the demand for new jobs. As Paice says: ‘Between 2014 and 2018, almost 20 million young Nigerians sought to join the workforce, but only 3.5 million new jobs were created.’ Africa has the lowest workforce participation of any region in the world.

Never mind climate change; Africa has always been prone to drought and chronic freshwater shortages. Despite repeated prophesies of an African renaissance that never materialises, the continent suffers from poor governance, persistent ethnic conflict and endemic corruption. In middle Africa, three-quarters of the population endures moderate to severe food insecurity. Wouldn’t you consider heading somewhere else?

This massive demographic shift is this century’s most momentous development, yet it’s barely ever discussed. Right on Europe’s doorstep is a fast-rising population of poorly educated, unemployed young people with lousy prospects. The more these desperate people make it to the prosperous West, the more friends and relatives will also be incentivised to try. They all have smartphones, whose pictures of glistening martinis, fast cars and glamorous advertising models are beamed to dusty villages and urban slums. ‘What’s there for us here?’ asked a young Senegalese man trying to convince his parents to let him go to Europe in last weekend’s New York Times. ‘We all have migration in mind.’

This is certain to get ugly. Worthy Euro-crats may lecture their citizenries about the wonders of multiculturalism, but a continent overwhelmed by hundreds of millions if not billions of immigrants from radically different cultures won’t be a happy place. Race will make the situation touchy and politically fraught. The welfare state could collapse as the nationalities at issue tend to be net economic drains. Yes, the West has labour shortages, but with accelerating automation and AI, the workers we’ll most need will be highly skilled.

No one is planning for this. Me, I would scrap the entire asylum system as the relic of an earlier era without cheap international transportation, instant communication and generous welfare benefits, conceived when global population was a quarter of today’s. I’d also scrap the Refugee Convention, the ECHR and any other treaty or law that impedes enforcement of national borders. I’d stop government funding of interfering pro-migration NGOs. The alternative is to accept that Europe as we currently know it is culturally and economically finished. I try to avoid predictions, but this one is sure-fire: absent a populist electoral uprising, European authorities will get serious about border control only once it’s too late. And you know what they’ll say in the online comments, don’t you? ‘It’s already too late.’

Watch Lionel Shriver and demographer Paul Morland discuss more on Spectator TV:

What will Europe look like in the future? | The Spectator

 

 

 

 

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