The Heart of Education: From Paul Buck to the Age of AI
Ed Reither
Monticello, 1954
It was 1954, and Paul Buck stood at a lectern in Monticello, Illinois. A historian by training, Harvard’s provost by appointment, and soon to be the university’s chief librarian, Buck had been invited to address a gathering of librarians and educators. The theme was perennial: the cost of libraries, their swelling collections, their stubborn refusal to balance against the ledgers of presidents and trustees.
By mid-century, many university leaders had begun to see libraries less as assets than as liabilities. The one-millionth volume, once celebrated as a milestone of scholarship, was now whispered about as a burden. “Too many books,” the presidents sighed. “Too much money.”
Buck, who loved books not only as artifacts but as living conduits of meaning, would have none of it. His message was simple: libraries must stop apologizing for their costs and start affirming their contributions. “We ought to stop talking about how much we cost,” he declared, “and begin emphasizing what we contribute.”
Then, then as a true historian who knew the value of first principles, he laid out a credo. The library, he insisted, is the heart of education. It is the conservator of learning, the base of research, the magnet for scholars, the guarantor of quality teaching, the means by which intellectual resources are exploited, and the safeguard of intellectual freedom. Without it, a university was a shell. With it, education had a living core.
He told a story of an old Vermonter asked whether it was awful to grow older and older. “No,” the man replied, “’tain’t awful at all. If I warn’t getting older, I’d be dead.” So too with libraries: growth was life. To stop growing was to die.
That was the Monticello credo of 1954: Libraries were the heart of education
Widener: The Geography of Knowledge
Seventy years later, I can sit at my desk and open a laptop. With a few keystrokes, I can call upon powers Buck could scarcely imagine: Google, JSTOR, Wikipedia, ChatGPT. I can type a question — about medieval historiography, rabbinic Judaism, or the architecture of Widener itself — and an answer materializes instantly.
It is seductive. It feels as if the world’s knowledge has been poured into the machine at my fingertips. But I know better. I know because I have taken the Red Line to Harvard Square, walked past the Coop and the students rushing between classes, and climbed the granite steps of Widener Library.
Inside, the marble lobby opens like a civic temple. Portraits of benefactors and past librarians look down as if to remind you that knowledge has always been sponsored, endowed, and guarded. The air has its own stillness, a kind of acoustics of learning: the muffled shuffle of feet, the whisper of turning pages.
Then the work begins. I log into HOLLIS, Harvard’s catalog. I trace leads through entries, bibliographies, subject headings. But this is only the threshold. The catalog directs me into the stacks, into the labyrinth that Buck himself once tried to rationalize and expand.
Down I go into Pusey’s underground levels, where compact shelving holds endless rows of books, densely packed, the smell of paper and binding glue still clinging to the air. Up I go into the Phillips Reading Room on the sixth floor, where light pours through high windows onto oak tables. Each floor has its own character: some bright and bustling, others dim and almost subterranean, like crypts of print.
And beyond Widener lie the satellites: Houghton with its manuscripts and incunabula, where curators bring forth treasures in gloved hands; the Divinity School Library with its theological treatises; the Botany Library where illustrations of flora unfold like delicate fossils of knowledge; the Gutman Library at the School of Education; and dozens more, each a memory palace, each a heart chamber in the larger body of Harvard.
This is the geography of knowledge as Buck understood it: layered, stratified, physical, demanding.
The Illusion of Instant Access
How different it is to ask a question of ChatGPT. The machine responds without hesitation. It does not ask me to take a train, climb steps, fill out call slips, or handle fragile manuscripts. It does not require me to wait, to wrestle with contradictions, or to sit in silence among other seekers.
But what it cannot do is replicate the work of interpretation. It cannot teach me to weigh one source against another, to notice the marginal note in a scholar’s handwriting, to integrate fact into context, to wrestle with meaning. It can retrieve, rearrange, and even generate new combinations of information. But it cannot assimilate them. It cannot experience them.
The answers it provides shimmer with the appearance of completeness, like gold glittering in a pan. But more often than not, they are fool’s gold. Information is plentiful, but knowledge — the slow turning of information into understanding — is scarce. And wisdom, tested by experience, is scarcer still.
The Oligarchic Heart
There is a deeper continuity. Libraries, for all their democratic rhetoric, were never purely open. They were stratified institutions, guarded by systems of privilege. Undergraduates had access to some shelves, graduate students to more, faculty to the rare materials in the vaults. Access widened as one ascended the academic ladder.
Today, AI presents itself as radically democratic: anyone with a smartphone can ask it anything. But behind the curtain lie the same structures of control. Vast paywalled databases remain locked. Corporate licensing agreements decide what sources enter the training sets. Just as Houghton’s treasures are not placed on open shelves, so too much of human knowledge remains sealed in digital vaults.
The heart still beats unevenly, its circulation shaped by power.
A 21st-Century Credo
If Buck were alive today, what would he say at Monticello? I think his voice would echo, with new inflections:
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Growth is not enough. Information now multiplies infinitely, but only curation and interpretation turn it into meaning.
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Contribution over cost remains the measure. The value of knowledge lies not in accumulation but in what it enables us to become.
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Access must be public, not proprietary. To surrender libraries to corporate servers is to hollow out the heart of education.
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Technology is ally, not substitute. Just as microfilm once aided librarians without replacing books, AI must be seen as a tool of access, not an oracle of truth.
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The human dimension is indispensable. Interpretation, integration, and judgment remain the pulse of education.
The Fool’s Gold of Technology
And so the moral comes clear. The information we receive on our screens, however dazzling, is often only a flash in the pan. It glitters like gold but more often proves to be fool’s gold. What it lacks is the slow work of assimilation — the labor of turning data into cognition, and cognition into wisdom.
Libraries taught this long before AI. They were never simply warehouses of books. They were organs of interpretation, places where human beings confronted abundance and transformed it into meaning. That is why Buck called them the heart of education.
We must not mistake the shimmer of instant information for the treasure of knowledge. Wisdom does not come from answers typed by a machine. Wisdom comes from the lived encounter: in the stacks, in the archives, in the silence of reading rooms, in the dialogue between teacher and student, in the hard work of integrating experience into understanding.
This is what Paul Buck knew in 1954, and it is what we must remember in 2025. The heart of education still beats — but only so long as we refuse to confuse fool’s gold with the real.