A razor gang at the Auckland Council led to yesterday’s announcement that the city’s libraries are cutting 74 members of staff. Former Auckland librarian Ethan Sills reports.

Libraries are magical institutions. It can feel unreal that they still exist, given how fantastical the idea of them seems. Buildings where you can go and borrow books for free, chat to people with a passion for books and exchange knowledge, all at (mostly) no cost. The very concept of libraries feels like something you’d find in one of the many books they hold.

Yesterday’s announcement by the Auckland City Council provided the cold reality. After months of consultation and media reports, it revealed the results of its risible Fit for the Future programme, designed to “evolve” the city’s library network.

More on cuts at Auckland Libraries:

Toby Manhire: Auckland librarians have been issued a script to answer cutback queries. We’ve done them one, too

We now know that 74 staff members have taken voluntary redundancy, while around 100 currently vacant positions have been disbanded. “The same level of service will reduce by approximately $1.8 million a year, meaning better value for money for ratepayers,” chirped the council’s inane press release. Job loss dressed as lamb.

My love for libraries started while at school. Generations of nerds had libraries as our place of refuge, whether it be for reading or playing Magic School Bus on the computer.

Having volunteered much of my high school time at my library, when it came time to find a part time job at university, the central city library seemed like the perfect place. I got a job there as a shelver, and there I stayed for three years.

Friends and family members commented on what a quiet, relaxed job it must be, clearly imagining the trope of libraries as a den of silence where any noise is expressly forbidden.

In reality, libraries – at least this one – are busy, noisy, bustling places. There were very few elderly women shushing people from behind giant wooden counters. It’s actually a fairly eclectic group of librarians of all ages and experiences, most of whom would be open for a chat rather than telling you off.

And the size of the operations was nothing like what I had expected. So many different departments with people constantly working on different projects. The three public floors housing different sections were backed up by a two storey, maddening maze of a basement that houses thousands of old books from across the network.

For a very repetitive job, it was surprising how interesting it could be at times. The people, both in front of and behind the counter, can be entertaining. I had one woman ask me, quite seriously, if I was her son – about the only odd customer experience I had, but I know people who have had far more. As it’s a public building, pretty much anyone can come in, from small children who meow for an hour straight (a sound that echoes in a fairly open-air environment) to one couple who got caught trying to have sex in the public bathrooms.

That’s not to say that it’s a riot all the time. Not only do the librarians have fairly regular difficult customers to tend to, but they have had to deal with a lot of behind the scenes interference long before these cuts were proposed. Over the course of my time there, not a week went by without some new complaint making the rounds: proposals that have been made, changes that were happening, a lack of staff, really anything seemed to strike a nerve.

At first, it seemed like people were just complaining for the sake of complaining. Yet, no matter how often people complained there – and they complained often – I never met anyone who seemed to actively hate working there. Most of their complaints came from a desire to see things changed for the betterment of both customer and employee rather than from hating the job. I never saw anyone take out their problems with management on the customers. Quite often you’d run into people complaining about things while going out of their way to help the customers.

Yet this latest change seems to be taking its toll – a Radio New Zealand online headline reads “Low morale among Auckland librarians.” A passion for the job can’t help you survive uncomfortable, sometimes hostile work environments when people all around you are losing their jobs; there’s nothing worse than having the possibility of unemployment hanging over your head for months on end. One former colleague I recently ran into revealed they were quitting as they couldn’t deal with all of it anymore – they don’t want to go, but feel they have no choice.

The whole Fit for the Future programme – or Fucked for the Future, as some of my ex-colleagues call it – reached its climax this week. Staff still must re-apply for their jobs, and this report of having to work across multiple libraries has been confirmed as well, despite the initial denial. And apparently it’s all been to “future-proof” the libraries, following earlier reports that it was to make the network “digital led”.

What being digital led means exactly is anyone’s guess. The most obvious answer would have something to do with a change to e-books over physical copies – an idea that would’ve made sense back when they were new and exciting, less so now. A recent report from The Guardian shows that e-book sales are on the decline in the UK while physical book sales have risen for the second year in a row. The report noted that it was 16-34 year olds and children’s books that were driving the changes, with physical books being their sole break from electronic devices.

In New Zealand, where numbers have varied from year to year, basing a library network around e-books feels like an attempt to look modern more than anything of practical use. Never once while I was there did it ever seem that check-outs were decreasing. As a shelver, for the whole three years it was the same workload. In fact, by the time I left we had more to do after several shelvers left and weren’t replaced.

The latest staff cuts have been hovering around for some time now. As the council notes, there has been a hiring freeze since last year, meaning that whenever someone leaves, their job has simply been left vacant, leaving the rest of the staff and a small army of casuals to pick up the slack. And when they aren’t there, the absence is felt. There have been many times when I left as the evening shift began and there would only be a few people covering a multiple tasks. And now that they officially will have less than 1000 employees, that problem will likely get worse if changes aren’t made to their workload.

Libraries are magical, but only if they are filled with people to help bring out the magic. Being digital-led may be unavoidable, but as Neil Gaiman once said: “Google can bring you back 100,000 answers. A librarian can bring you back the right one.”

The Spinoff Review of Books is brought to you by Unity Books.

Education in New Zealand is obsessed with assessment and ticking the right boxes, and not doing the Wrong Thing. A new book argues in favour of positive disobedience as practised and taught by that apparent figure of authority: the teacher.

It’s late at night. Outside you can hear the hum of commuters as they make their exodus from the city. Their tyres swish through a black skin of water still clinging to the street. I’m sitting here unsure how to begin talking about productive disobedience and how it reforms the world in which we live.

In my office the light is dim. On the walls there are small objects − eclectic scavengings, the detritus of many journeys. These are gifts I’ve been given because students across 40 years of teach­ing have known of my penchant for the unusual and neglected. They are poignant things: an old felt heart stuffed with lavender, a Julia Kristeva voodoo doll, a broken bicycle lamp brought back from the ferocity of a Soviet winter, and flowers now drained of colour, grown delicate and brittle with age.

Among these objects there are two photographs.

The first shows a boy. He’s 10 years old. It was taken in the 1960s. In this picture he sits at a regulation wooden school desk looking up at the camera. The pencil poised in his hand is not his own, nor is the book in which he is pretending to write. Behind him, artfully arranged on the wall, are some paintings of mush­rooms, but these are not his either.

The boy’s father and mother were shearing contractors who worked the woolsheds of Ngaroma, Arohena, Puahue and Parawera − places most people have never heard of. At the time the photo was taken he couldn’t read or write. In fact he wouldn’t be able to do these things until he was 14. He was destined to live out his years in school at the bottom of the class. When he left primary school he would receive a certificate for being the bin monitor. Four years later he would be expelled from college. Although he would eventually enter teacher training, he would be suspended halfway through the programme. After his probation year of teaching he’d be refused certification and he’d resign.

Although he would return to teaching, in subsequent years he’d receive letters of admonishment from Education Boards and boards of governors. All of these were related to his propensity to break rules. There would be pickets outside one of the schools in which he taught and the protesters would demand his removal.

He would spend a lot of time fighting.

The second photo is a page torn out of Time magazine. It is of a man in his 50s who has just received an award. He’s a professor. In the years that follow this photograph he would be given medals for his research and teaching and his PhD students would become thought leaders who changed organisations around the world.

His trajectory would be a blaze of acknowledgement. Although he would go to the same teachers’ training college as the boy in the other photograph, he would graduate with distinction. Across his years in primary, intermediate and secondary teaching, educators would be ferried through his classrooms to watch the innovative approaches he took to developing learning. He would become one of the architects of the New Zealand technology curriculum, he would found an alternative school, and in 2004 he would be awarded the country’s first PhD in creative practice. Today he is an advisor on creativity to a range of international business and educational organisations. The films he has created have screened at Cannes and Berlin and have been shortlisted for the Oscars. In 2001, in recognition of his contribution to education, he was awarded the inaugural New Zealand Prime Minister’s Supreme Award for Teaching Excellence.

These are two very different photographs. They show two people who made life journeys through the New Zealand educa­tion system. One was a fighter and one was a negotiator, but I am not sure which of them would be better to ask about the nature of schooling in this country. Both were driven by passion. Both made unusual choices and tried to change the things that hap­pened around them.

But if you look closely, their awkward smiles and unease in front of the camera suggest something they have in common. These are photographs of the same man. And he is professionally disobedient.

So what’s my book Disobedient Teaching about? Well, it’s not a teaching manual or a self-help book or a treatise on New Zealand education, although you could think about it in all of these ways. Perhaps you might describe it as an arm around the shoulder of people who try to change things for the better. Perhaps somebody like you.

It’s concerned with the power of the disobedient teacher. Such teach­ers and learners are not passive or submissive, and this book tells stories about them. There are stories from the chalk face. Some are funny and some are poignant, but they all show alternative ways that teachers influence students, schools and the wider com­munities in which we operate. It argues for empowerment and demonstrates our ability to affect change virally.

Disobedience is a 12th-century French word that means refusal to “submit to a higher power or authority”. When we dis­obey we move beyond acquiescence. We assume that “authority” is an insufficient argument for the abeyance of thinking and action. When we disobey we look into the heart of a situation we are encountering and we make change because we know we are empowered to do so. So I don’t think disobedience is a dirty word. It’s simply claiming the right to see and respond to the world in a different way. Productive disobedience is an agency that moves things forward.

Disobedient teaching is what happens when you close the door on your classroom or office and try unconventional things because your professional compass tells you that it is right. It doesn’t wait for permission. It understands how systems work and it is compassionate and strong enough to take risks to make things better. It disobeys and positively changes systems. It doesn’t tell you to remain compliant while you climb the hierarchi­cal ladder. Disobedient teaching is rooted in the belief that you can influence things right now, from where you are. Beyond New Zealand’s current obsession with micro-managing teachers and students it advocates for something better and infinitely richer. It challenges our educational preoccupation with marking, reporting and accounting. Most importantly, it shows how and why highly effective educators operate beyond these confines.

Disobedient teachers are humane, passionate, creative risk takers. They are professional in a sense of the word that reaches beyond the compliant ticking of performance indicators. They ask questions and they don’t give up − and they make things better.

Disobedient Teaching: Surviving & Creating Change in Education by Welby Ings (Otago University Press, $35) is available at Unity Books.