To the Editor:

Two front page stories in the May 6 issue of Town Topics, one describing the negotiating breakdown between the Board of Education (BOE) and teachers’ union (PREA) [“District/Teacher Talks Break Down”], and the other describing a $2.9M public library upgrade [“Library Seeks to Raise $1.7 Million for Second Floor Redesign, Upgrade”], present an interesting contrast.

Ms. Burger, director of the Princeton Public Library, commendably observes that “the world has changed dramatically” since the library opened in its new building 11 years ago. She specifically identifies radical upgrades and redesigns of space, technology, and programs to accommodate the ongoing information-age renaissance we are living through. The BOE/PREA, article, however, could’ve been written in the early 20th century, when labor and management clashed perennially over compensation policy in the old manufacturing-based economy. Nowhere do we read that BOE and PREA acknowledge the “dramatic changes” in our new knowledge-economy, or frame their dispute in the context of a world undergoing radical transformation by technology and the systemic improvements it enables.

While today’s pre-schoolers face a future world radically different from that of their grandparents in: manufacturing, retail, transportation/logistics, consumer services, even, finally, in healthcare, those grandparents would be quite at home in today’s educational institutions. The EdTech revolution is desirable, inevitable, and already underway. Princeton’s Public Library administration seems to understand that in a way our public school establishment does not.

Brandon Hull

Linden Lane