Children's authors such as Philip Pullman and Malorie Blackman are calling for a halt to the "shocking decline" in England's school libraries.
They, along with 148 others, wrote to Education Secretary Justine Greening, asking her to signal her belief in the "value of literacy" for learning. [...] The letter highlights how England has lower rates of teenage literacy than other developed nations, according to international rankings.

Boris explains trickle-down // "they need better education" tories cut education real terms and now teachers ask for toilet paper, pens, and cut culture! a bare minimum education. for culture you have to be better off. after all, there are now no museums and libraries in your town.

In the Big Controversy over Google being forced by EUcrats to delete a 2007 BBC story about one of the villains of the Financial Meltdown, former Merrill Lynch chairman Stan O’Neal, the debate has so far been limited to “freedom of the press” versus “our right to privacy.” It’s the perfect frame of debate, from Google’s point of view, because it diverts us from the real problem that brought us to this point in the first place: Google’s enormous monopoly power over “what we know”—or at least, what we think we know. If it’s not Google-able, it’s presumed to have been deleted from the historical record. And that presumption is based on the way most of us search or source information. +++ http://pando.com/2014/07/04/google-admits-that-the-censorship-of-news-articles-was-its-fault-not-a-european-courts/ + http://bit.ly/1tfu3VC

> Knowledge that is not proprietary - got to be free. < >> "Elsevier’s practices make me deeply deeply angry. While academic publishing as a whole is pretty flawed, Elsevier takes the most insidious practices further at each and every turn, always at the expense of those of us who are trying to produce, publish, and distribute research." + http://thecostofknowledge.com/

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