Bradbury, Cleavers, and libraries as educators

Kate De Goldi is talking to Kim Hill this Saturday about the authors Vera and Bill Cleaver - husband and wife writing team perhaps best known for their novel Where the lilies bloom about an orphan family growing up in the Appalachian Mountains, earning a living from finding medicinal plants... Though neither of the Cleavers finished college, they both put a great emphasis on self-directed learning, claiming to be "graduates of the public libraries of America."
In the quirky way that things connect, the same day I read about the Cleavers, a friend sent me an article by Alison Flood at the Guardian newspaper on Ray Bradbury, the author of Farenheit 451, who has launched a series of fund-raisers with a passionate defence of the US public library system...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/jun/22/ray-bradbury-defends-libraries

"Libraries raised me. I don't believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don't have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn't go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years," he said. "I read everything in the library. I read everything. I took out 10 books a week so I had a couple of hundred books a year I read, on literature, poetry, plays, and I read all the great short stories, hundreds of them. I graduated from the library when I was 28 years old. That library educated me, not the college." Ray Bradbury