Walking down Canal St, I found myself thinking about RC and
“the future of education”. I’ve been doing some reflective thinking
about my time at RC lately.
I’m captivated a bit by the idea that RC might predict the future of
libraries. The batch model doesn’t map, but zooming out, RC is a place for
self-directed study (there’s nuance around the difference between study and
practice, where RC is both and maybe weighted to the latter, but both seem to
fall into the category of self-improvement). And when you strip away the
books and the borrowing of media, that’s what libraries feel like in my head:
places to go to acquire knowledge in a self-directed way.
The community aspects of RC don’t necessarily map directly to existing libraries, but
there are interesting possibilities there, too. The codes of conduct make sense
(they do for any public environment, probably). But especially the ability to
interact with others across (or filtered by) a broad set of interests. You’re
learning something, and you have channels (Zulip, Community, the wiki) to learn from and ask questions of
others. It doesn’t feel like the geography of one library matters all that much.
The RC community is broadly distributed, and each individual library might just
be an entry node into a broader community.
This seems even more relevant if the future includes massive shifts in the
workforce and things like universal basic income. Libraries as community
learning centers, where individuals can choose to develop their skills (and
learn new ones), seems like a fairly natural focus. There will likely be room
for more didactic education as well, but the (financial) motivator will be
different.