Educating and training library practitioners: a comparative history with trends and recommendations - includes appendix on history of library education

Following a similar logic, we may pay a baby-sitter minimum wage, finding it unreasonable as well as unappealing to think that the baby would be watched more vigilantly or with more tenderness if we were to double the wage of the baby's sitter. Such considerations touch on our expectations and values in the areas of love, intimacy, compassion, empathy, and decency. That these concerns often apply to fields such as teaching, nursing, and librarianship is not simply discrimination against women or "women's work" any more than reluctance to fund the arts is merely an attempt to prevent the dissemination of Mapplethorpe.

It follows that the failure or tacit refusal of librarians to leap onto some higher-paying information-management bandwagon may not be out of docility, weakness, or victimhood. It may also be that, while society may sometimes generously fund only the architectural monuments of libraries, it is not necessarily just stinginess or lack of appreciation that keeps it from being more financially generous about the work that goes on in those libraries. A more complex set of values is at play here, something that deserves further analysis.

Distinctions Between Training and Education

There has been, since at least the Williamson report, a consistent resistance to practical training at the graduate level. Carnovsky (1942) discusses curricular reform in an attempt to:

apprehend librarianship as an intellectual discipline, to see it steadily

and to see it whole. Preparation for it should be conceived in terms

of concepts and functions, not in terms of time. The mastery of

skills, techniques, and routines should not be permitted to eclipse

the many other characteristics which in sum determine the successful

librarian. (p. 411)

Rayward (1983) quotes Robert Maynard Hutchins from the 1936 Stores lectures at Yale to the effect that vocationalism "leads to triviality and isolation" (p. 1315). This, we note, is exactly the kind of impression that has accompanied the closure of a number of graduate schools. Any emphasis on the practical, Rayward continues, "even if it were possible to succeed with it, interferes with the education of the student" (p. 1315).

The anti-practical argument is still very much alive when it comes to graduate library education. White (1991) treats it as "that most fundamental question of whether we educate for a profession or train for a job" (p. 69). He goes on to say: "The uniqueness of education as contrasted to training (and the two are classically contrasted) is that even twenty years on the job is not likely to provide a substitute for education" (p. 69).

Richard Budd (1992), dean of the Rutgers library school, asserts that "the prime goal of any act of education is that it should serve us in the future...take us somewhere...let us move onward more easily....Without these critical ingredients, we are in fact not educators, but, rather, `trainers'" (p. 46). As to the value of training: "[A]ll training becomes almost immediately obsolete. That ongoing process of training can be handled by supervisors or vendors" (White, 1995, p. 44).