Have you heard the one....

...about the dyslexic who walks into a bra?

Darwin, Einstein and Freud walk into a bar... (stop me if you've heard this). In a group at the bar are Sir Isaac Newton, Madame Curie, DaVinci, Shakespeare, Socrates, Werner von Braun and Stephen Hawking. Now when that group gets to carousing a bit, are you going to grab the first available barstool with them, or are you going to sit at a corner table, wait to be served, and watch, or are you going to go find another bar?

If your answer is either of the latter, you have just erected a barrier for yourself. Well, to be more accurate, that barrier resides within your psyche and has for some time. How long, how high and how wide is your barrier? Now I want you to multiply that by an unknown factor (x) and you may begin to get some idea of how the immigrants, high school dropouts and even some folks of average intelligence and education feel when they walk into our bar.

Since this barrier is (hopefully) not of our own making, there is little we can do to prevent it. There is much we can do to dismantle or demolish it if we are sensitive to its existence. To come down off this pedestal-barrier, to meet every question with a down-to-earth manner, to treat all as an equal are, I think, some of the highest objectives any librarian, any educator, can aspire to.