In The Crisis of Narration (Herder), Byung-Chul Han invites us to recover the habit of telling stories, in the face of a digital disenchantment that occurs, he warns, when reality dissolves in a flood of data. “Narratives – he maintains – are generators of community. Storytelling, on the contrary, only creates communities. The community is the community in the form of merchandise. It consists of consumers. No storytelling will be able to relight a camp fire, around which people gather to tell stories.” The fragmentation of the day into a succession of screenshots is a trend that dynamites the ability to concentrate and classic learning methods. Until the technological revolution began, school libraries were the hard drive of educational centers. There the value of narration was learned, in the sense that the philosopher gives it.
But, little by little, the PCs began to occupy the reading tables and the function of acquiring and promoting editorial funds was neglected. It was when some managers began to spread the idea that libraries should relegate books to become spaces for technological connection and learning new formats. They did not yet know that paper was going to win the war against the e-book and that the proliferation of fake news would end up resituating the book as a guarantee of reliability. It seems that we are now entering a new stage. The suspicion that the lack of reading habit may be one of the causes of the deterioration of the educational level – there is the shameful Catalan PISA – advises changing the pace. For example, the ambitious National Book and Reading Plan promoted by the Department of Culture places the revitalization of school libraries among its priorities. The plan is approved and funded and has generated expectations in the publishing sector. We just need to develop it and wait for there to be a budget agreement in Catalonia so that this and other fundamental projects do not remain in limbo.
It is not a counterrevolution. Today the school year resumes after the Christmas break. It would be interesting to tell the classrooms that what is revolutionary, now and always, is to immerse yourself in the stories that books tell. As Byung-Chul Han points out, “all transformative action is based on a narrative.”
