These days, the laminated reading posters peeling at the corners and the new arrivals shelf are not the first things you notice when you enter a middle school library in a suburban area of Ohio. Sitting on the front desk is a small wooden box that was once used to store index cards back when card catalogs were still in use. There are trading cards inside, arranged by category. Not Pokémon. Not in baseball. cards of theory. Cards with titles like “social contract,” “confirmation bias,” and “the bystander effect” printed in neat serif type, accompanied by a brief description on the reverse and a tiny image that wouldn’t be out of place in a New Yorker cartoon.
For at least a year, if not more, librarians have been discreetly stocking these with textbooks. From what I understand, it began with a few schools in the Pacific Northwest and then, as these things usually do, spread through district newsletters and conference chatter. The librarians I’ve spoken to seem to have happened upon something by chance. Children who would not remain motionless during a research workshop will argue over the rarity of “Occam’s razor” and “cognitive dissonance” for forty minutes.
It would be easy to interpret this as just another gimmick, the kind of educational fad that pops up every few years before vanishing into a storage closet. However, it feels different in some way. Nearly 80% of high school students struggle to confirm the reliability of a source, according to a 2016 Stanford study, and the figures haven’t significantly improved since. For years, librarians have raised this alarm—mostly in vain. In some way, the discussion is now taking place because children want to understand what “ad hominem” means in order to properly use the card.
Here, the cultural context is important. According to research funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, about 20% of school librarian positions in the United States have vanished over the last ten years. Many states no longer mandate that schools have a librarian on staff. The people who are still working do more with less, frequently covering several buildings, and they have had to come up with creative ways to stay current. Strangely enough, trading cards are a tactic that emerged from that desperation. It has a hint of melancholy as well as a hint of hope.
If you stroll around long enough, you will begin to notice little scenes. Using the school’s water fountain as an example, a seventh-grader in Michigan bent over the carpet and explained “the tragedy of the commons” to a friend. A junior in Texas high school asks the librarian if “Pascal’s wager” is outweighed in trades. Instructors report that during lunch, students who never raised their hands in class are now correcting one another on definitions. It’s still unclear if any of this is leading to quantifiable improvements in academic performance. There is a lag in the data. Anecdotes don’t.
It is reasonable for critics to argue that simplifying intricate philosophical and psychological concepts is a form of distortion in and of itself. In forty words, utilitarianism is difficult to comprehend. The speed at which small startups have entered the market to print rival decks suggests that investors in educational publishing still think the format is viable. Some of them are good. Some people are careless. Like baseball scouts, the librarians sort through them to determine which sets deserve shelf space.
It’s difficult to ignore the fact that the generation trading paper cards in a hallway is the same one that was purportedly lost to screens. Perhaps that is the true story, the one that remains to be discovered. Experiences that are slower and more tactile are still appealing. All they needed was someone to place them on the desk while they waited.
