The traditional library still plays a vital role in the school system

Have school libraries had their day? The printed book’s previously unassailable supremacy as the medium of learning is rapidly being replaced by other more sophisticated electronic means. Books are still popular among the young, often promoted by social networking, but with the internet and much else, is their future (if they have one) merely recreational?

In allocating budgets, school managers often see the library as a place where all forms of information ‘technology’ (including books) can be integrated. It is often a suitable room or area for computers and terminals of all kinds. In some schools the gracious but underused library, the vibrant study place of a past age, is now designated a place of quiet study — tolerated somnolence.

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Julie Burchill

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In some educational philosophies reading has a crucial place, and this is true of the Benedictine model. In St Benedict’s Rule a special place is reserved for lectio divina (sacred reading). This is a way of reading which emphasises reflection and contemplation. Books are singularly suitable for this task, and the codex, the origin of the modern book, probably began life as a sacred text. Within this tradition books are perhaps irreplaceable.

If you visit Downside today, it is the great neo-Gothic abbey church which dominates the scene. It signposts the monastic priority of prayer. The largest of modern monastic churches, it also has the claim to be the most beautiful. Its imposing east end is presently under a cover of scaffolding, part of the major restoration intended to coincide with the bicentenary of the abbey and school in 1814. To the south-east of the church is a striking free-standing building, built of concrete, glass and stone, very 1970s modernist in style, in marked contrast to the church. To some visitors it appears, with its octagonal shape and its significant relationship to the church, to be an oversized chapter house.