Listen to This Article Enhance your reading experience by listening to this article.

Two days after joining Form Five at Kakamega High School in 1983, I noticed something I had never seen in my previous school. It had a library with a collection of hundreds of books.

I saw lines of bookshelves with fictional and nonfictional works. The library had bookshelves lined with novels, poetry, plays—all of them by great writers.

It has nonfiction works on the arts and humanities: Encyclopaedias of all kinds, books on sciences, speeches and national geographic books. The school provided for daily supply of newspapers and weekly magazines.

My previous school, Kivaywa Secondary, did not have this facility. However, the school had brilliant teachers who had unusual understanding of the subjects they taught. We had exceptional teachers of English, Literature, Geography, History, Mathematics and Sciences.

The school had sufficient textbooks—all of appropriate complexity and quality—as then prescribed by Kenya Institute of Education as the Kenya Institute of Curriculum Development was then called.

The two equally critical institutions in an educational system—teachers and textbooks—provided us with exceptional learning experience.

The unusual brilliance of the teachers and complexity and quality the prescribed textbooks exposed us to the knowledge, skills, values, and attitudes the curriculum embodied.
Both enabled the student community to acquire the knowledge and skills a secondary education ordinarily should give.

A walk through the school library at Kakamega, however, convinced me that the educational experience at my former school would have been awesome had it had a library. We joined Form One with a highly developed reading fluency.

In reading jargon, fluency is the ability to read a text accurately, at an acceptable pace, and with proper expression and comprehension. Reading fluency is important because it develops comprehension and motivates readers.

It is the connecting link between reading phases such as early reading and later reading. Children must be able to read fluently—with understanding—whether they are reading aloud or silently.

The student community at Kivaywa, as in most secondary schools, were proficient readers—thanks to the extensive reading experience the school library in primary schools in the 1970s gave us.

We had little or no reading challenges by the time we joined secondary schools—be they Harambee (community) or full-fledged Government Secondary Schools. The school library is an institution in its own right. There is no school involved in the business of education without a school library.

Megan McDonald, American children’s writer says: “School libraries are the heartbeat of the school. They serve as a resource to all students and support both required and independent reading. They shape lives.”

Regardless of the shifting information and communication landscape, libraries will and should be an integral feature of educational institutions. They will always exist as places for learners to find information, resources, services, and instruction.

It is the reason why national education policy, curricular and standards has provided for a school library system. It is the reason why the Ministry of Education, in conjunction with KICD, provides library lessons in the school timetable. Students are expected to have a library lesson once every week.

It is the reason why schools whose leadership prepares learners for the future and not for examinations maintain libraries with sufficient collections of books—fictional and nonfictional works for learners to read without undue focus on textbooks, revision books and past paper examinations scripts.

Without doubt, the school library is a critical pedagogic tool that significantly enhances student achievement: in the short term for examinations and in the long run for work, career and advanced education and training.

— The writer is Communications Officer, Ministry of Education