Mister Agustín Nieto Caballero recalls in Una escuela: “We are all aware that the library is not an ornament of the school or a repository of books, but a living treasure of knowledge where each volume holds a special message”. The libraries of the Gimnasio Moderno are a resource center, multidisciplinary classrooms where all members of the community can go, from students and teachers to administrators, parents, and former students, to find bibliographic support to help them prepare classes, do research, complement homework, do recreational reading, and support family reading. In summary, libraries should serve to inform, form, and recreate readers.
Today, libraries have become places of reference, where a great number of experiences related to reading and writing take place, they are a meeting point for numerous activities, and they reflect the diversity and characteristics of the community they serve. The library should be the heart of the school, supporting active learning in all areas and levels, a space that is transversal to the curriculum and that, supported by an interdisciplinary team, can sustain the content of the areas, sections and courses from different instances.
With the renovation of the school buildings, there is now a new Children’s Library, located in the building where the associations used to be, and which is now a meeting point for children and reading. With the delivery of the Main Building, there will be an enlarged and renovated Founders’ Library, which recovers the original idea of that space where the Fernandez Madrid Theatre was, but which also includes technological equipment to bring reading closer to the interests of children. These efforts respond to the construction of a structured curriculum on reading and writing, but also to the vision of a school that wants to consolidate itself as a center of cultural entities for the city and Latin America.
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