
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, May 4, 1994                   TAG: 9405110066
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-14   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

LIBRARIES, ETC.

NO QUESTION, human beings need food, shelter and clothing. But in America, such things are plentiful. The presence of poverty may be an issue of distribution; it is not an issue of overall supply.

Why, then, must everything be judged by how much it adds to the material bounty?

Even the arts, pure science, literature, history - all else, that is, which makes life worth living - are often regarded as little more than tools for economic development; for example, as contributors to a "quality of life" that helps woo prospective employers.

In a lecture last month in Washington, D.C., historian David McCullough took note of an amazing - and disheartening - fact. During the Great Depression, observed the Pulitzer-winning biographer of Harry Truman, not one public library is known to have closed. In today's far more prosperous times, and despite substantial increases in the demand for library services, budget cutbacks are forcing libraries throughout the country to freeze book purchases, cut staff, shorten hours - and, sometimes, shut their doors.

As with libraries, McCullough

noted, so with the arts in education. When school budgets are tight, arts programs are often the first to go - regarded, falsely, as frivolous add-ons to what children really need to learn.

The power to acquire (and, even more important for human happiness, to appreciate) material affluence is not unconnected to libraries, the arts and assorted similar "frivolities." The ironic paradox, however, is that the more you try to force a relationship of immediate cause and effect, the less effective will be the connection.

If the test for having arts in the schools is whether it efficiently trains commercially viable artists, for example, then the arts will lose. If the test for libraries is whether there's a moneymaking tip in every book, then libraries will lose. So, however, will the "generous, exciting, creative education" of which McCullough spoke - the kind that nurtures an alert, inquisitive citizenry.

At stake, in the end, is how well the culture that bred the conditions for economic success is transmitted to the future. Lose that culture, and you risk losing the conditions. Lose the conditions, and you risk losing the success.

by CNB