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These days at bus stops near Panama City's public high schools, the juvenile police are much in evidence. What don't see often enough at such places are kids carrying books.

Panama's recent Book Week was celebrated with what was by all reports a successful book fair in David. In the capital, literacy's well-to-do backers turned out for a $100-a-ticket benefit for the Biblioteca Nacional, this country's best library. The Monday literary nights at ExcedraBooks are a great success.

However, let's put things in perspective --- any North American university with a book collection that's only the size of the Biblioteca Nacional's would risk losing its accreditation. The shortage of textbooks in our public schools would be a major political scandal in any industrialized country. We may have been one of the first Latin American countries to achieve something close to universal basic literacy, but we are woefully underdeveloped when it comes to our libraries, bookstores, book publishing industry and reading habits in general.

The Moscoso administration's application of the political patronage system to public school textbook purchasing doesn't help matters. Monopolistic practices in the book distribution business don't help either. Pseudo-nationalism that prefers inferior Panamanian texts to better ones from elsewhere in the Spanish-speaking world and an inferiority complex that values English-language education using US textbooks over excellence in Spanish-language education are two sides to the devalued coin of our academic standards.

These days the politicians are debating public school decentralization and an increased emphasis on the teaching of English --- both reasonable ideas --- without committing the resources to make much headway toward their stated goals.

Priorities must be set, and getting Panamanians of all ages to read more should be at the top of our educational agenda.

The government should spend far less on the crude political propaganda it disseminates through our mass media and use the money to subsidize our publishing industry instead. The subsidies should be mostly directed toward our writers, rather than to those publishers with the right political connections.

The Free Trade and Consumer Affairs Commission (CLICAC) should conduct a thorough investigation of our book and magazine distribution system, and suppress monopolistic practices.

The importation of books from around the world, and particularly the best textbooks from the Spanish-speaking world, should be encouraged in every possible way. There should be no barriers to excellence and no short rations in the reading material we provide our public school students.

Most of all, we should build a world class library, with all the latest technology and a massive book collection in many languages, a library that befits the Crossroads of the World.

This library should not only be a repository of literature, but a center for the translation of worthy books that are only available in other languages into Spanish, and of the best Panamanian writing into foreign tongues. It should be one of the Spanish-speaking world's great Internet nodes.

To attain such lofty goals, the facility would have to be independent of the government's and the University of Panama's political patronage scams. To most effectively boost Panama's overall development, this great library should be the centerpiece of the City of Knowledge.

Do what you feel in your heart to be right --- for you'll be criticized anyway.

Eleanor Roosevelt

Forget injuries, never forget kindnesses.

Confucius

I will follow the right side even to the fire, but excluding the fire if I can.

Michel de Montaigne

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