From Shelf Awareness:
Laura Amy Schlitz: School Librarian Wins the Newbery
Laura Amy Schlitz won the 2008 Newbery Medal for Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!: Voices from a Medieval Village, illustrated by Robert Byrd, making this the second year in a row that a librarian has taken the top prize (Shelf Awareness, January 15). Schlitz started these 21 dramatizations as pieces for her classes to perform at the Park School near Baltimore, Md., where she serves as librarian, and where each year students study the Middle Ages. Even though The Hero Schliemann: The Dreamer Who Dug for Troy, also illustrated by Robert Byrd, and A Drowned Maiden's Hair [both published in 2006 by Candlewick] came out earlier, Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! was the first book Schlitz wrote that was accepted for publication at Candlewick.
Me again. It's nice to see the middle ages being promoted to a younger crowd. There's been a discussion on the Crime Thru Time list about history in school and how often such a fascinationg subject is treated so badly that even those interested in history get bored. (I was pretty lucky. I had teachers who were actually inspired by their subject.) I think history is so terribly important (duh!). It tells us where we came from and, more often than not, where we're going. It tells us word origins, the cradle of the technology we enjoy today, architecture, math, even our styles of clothing. Why wouldn't this be interesting? But so often, our government, who decides how to allocate money for schools, doesn't understand the function of education. It's not just to get a job. It is to round out an individual. We are not a better people if we can do a math problem but can't appreciate art or music. And we certainly lose if we fail to gain a rudimentary knowledge of history, especially our own.
Whoo! It's high up here on this soap box. Think I'll climb down now.
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