a large and sensational scale--without the proper spirit and the proper
workers the result might be failure on a scale quite as sensational. And
an enthusiastic spirit, a high aim and unflagging energy--these are
things that no money can buy and that will bring success on the small
scale as on the large one.
We are fortunate--we who have charge of libraries and are trying to do
something worth while with them--that there is perhaps less of the
spirit of pure commercialism among us than among some other classes of
workers. For this, in part, we have to thank our inadequate salaries.
Persons who desire to work simply for the material reward will select
some other field. We are glad to get our reward--we certainly earn it;
but I venture to say that in the case of most of us there is also
something in the work that appeals to us. And that something is the
thing that, pushed to its furthest extent, will bring the dawn of to-day
into the most backward library. It is not a very inspiring thing simply
to sit down and watch a pile of books--hardly more so, I should think,
than to take care of a pile of bricks or a load of turnips. Interest,
enthusiasm, inspiration, come with realization of the fact that every
one of those books has a mission and that it is the librarian’s business
to find what it is and to see that it is performed. In the large,
wealthy institution this duty may be accompanied by the expenditure of
vast sums, and may be performed with the aid of things that only large
sums of money can buy; in the small library there may be but a single
librarian and only a few dollars to spend. But, just as in the case of a
city librarian with an ample salary, she has open to her the choice of
those three types of librarianship--the day before yesterday, yesterday
and to-day.
And how about the librarian of to-morrow? Perhaps it may be as well to
leave him or her for future consideration; but I cannot help saying just
a word. May it not be that in the days to come we shall have enough
civic pride to do whatever we may find to do--in our libraries or
anywhere else, not with our eyes fixed only upon the work itself,
important as that may be, but with the broader viewpoint of its effect
upon the whole community? May it not be that this librarian of to-morrow
will ask not, “Will it raise my circulation?” or even “Will it improve
the quality of my reading?” but “Will it better the reading that is done
in this community?” That librarian will not rejoice that his library
circulation of good novels has dropped, when he realizes that twice as
many bad novels are bought and read outside. He will be pleased that the
children in his library have learned to wash their hands, but chiefly
because he hopes that what they have learned may react upon the physical
cleanliness--and perhaps on the moral cleanliness, too--of the
community. Much as he will love the library, he will love it as an
agency for the improvement of the community in which he lives and works,
and he will do nothing for its aggrandizement, expansion or improvement
that involves a change of the community in the opposite direction. We
shall not see one library rejoicing because it has enticed away the
users of some other library; we may even see a library rejoicing that it
has lost its readers in Polish history, we will say, when it becomes
known that they have gone to another library with a better collection in
that subject.
I confess that I am looking forward to the day when we shall take this
view--when the adage “Every man for himself and the devil take the
hindmost” may be forgotten among institutions in the same town. The
policy that it represents makes for high speed, perhaps, but not for
solidarity. In a fight such as we are waging with the forces of
ignorance and indifference we should all keep shoulder to shoulder. This
is why the librarian should say: “I am a citizen; nothing in this city
is without interest to me.” That is why he should be a librarian of
to-day, and why he may even look forward with hopefulness to the dawn of
a still better to-morrow.
SCHOOL LIBRARIES AND MENTAL TRAINING
Is it more important in education to impart definite items of
information or to train the mind so that it will know how to acquire and
wish to acquire? To ask the question is to answer it; yet we do not
always live up to our lights.
In the older methods the teacher, or rather his predecessors, decided
what it would be necessary for the child to memorize, and then he was
made to memorize, while still without appreciation of the need of so
doing. We are perhaps in danger today of going to the other extreme. We
require so little memorization by the student that the memory, as a
practical tool of everyday life, is in danger of falling into disuse. It
is surely possible for us to exercise our pupils’ memories, to develop
them, and to control them, without giving them the fatal idea that
memory is a substitute for thought, or that the assimilation of others’
ideas, perfect though it may be, will altogether take the place of the
development of one’s own. There are still things that one must learn by
heart, but since they must be retained below the threshold of
consciousness, it is well that if possible they should also be acquired
below that threshold. The problem of consciously learning a quantity of
items of any kind and then relegating them to one’s subconsciousness in
such a way that they will be available at any given time is not, of
course, impossible. Most of us have at our disposal many facts that we
have learned in this way; but I venture to assert that most of us have
lost a large proportion of what we thus acquired. Now a man never
learns by rote the names of his relations, the positions of the rooms in
his house, the names of the streets in his town. He has acquired them
subconsciously as he needs them. When the human mind becomes convinced
of the need of information of this kind “in its business,” the acquiring
comes as a matter of course. In a language, the paradigms may be learned
unconsciously when the pupil sees that they are necessary in order to
understand an interesting passage; the multiplication table and tables
of weights and measures require no conscious memorization; or at least
such memorization may be undertaken voluntarily as a recognized means to
a desired end. I say these things may be done; I am sure that they are
in many schools; I am equally sure that they were unheard of in my own
boyhood; that is, as recognized methods in teaching. Of course, in spite
of schools and teachers and methods, a vast amount of information and
training has always been acquired in this way. I do not remember ever
“learning to read” as a set task. I am sure that none of my children
ever did so. We recognized the desirability of knowing how. We wanted to
learn, and so we learned; that is all. Of course our teachers and
parents and friends helped us along.
Is not this what the school is for--to make the pupil anxious to learn
and then to help him? When all schools are conducted on this principle,
we shall be very happy, but apparently it is not so simple as it would
appear.
What we should try to approximate, at all events, is an emancipation
from the thraldom of unwillingness on the part of the pupil--to bring it
about that he shall desire to learn and will take what measures he can
to do so, gladly availing himself of what help we can offer him.
I have said that what we need is to stimulate the pupil’s desire and
then to satisfy it. I have known teachers who were competent to do
both--who could take an ignorant, unwilling pupil and make of him an
enthusiast, thirsting for knowledge, in a few weeks. We all know of the
ideal university whose faculty consisted of Mark Hopkins on one end of a
log. I am sorry the creator of that epigram put his teacher on a log.
There are plenty of logs, and, from this fact, too many persons, I am
afraid, have leaped to the conclusion that there are also plenty of Mark
Hopkinses. I fear that one trouble with educators is that, hitching
their wagons to stars, they have assumed the possibility that
terrestrial luminaries also are able to raise us to the skies. If we had
a million Mark Hopkinses and a million boys for them to educate, we
should need only a sufficient quantity of logs; we should be forever
absolved from planning school-houses and making out schedules, from
writing textbooks and establishing libraries. As it is, we must do all
these things. We must adopt any and all devices to arouse and hold the
pupil’s interest, and we must similarly seek out and use all kinds of
machinery to satisfy that interest when once aroused. Of these devices
and machines, the individual teacher, with or without his textbooks,
lectures, recitations, laboratory work, and formal courses, is only one,
and perhaps in some cases not the one to be preferred as the primary
agent. Among such devices I believe that a collection of books, properly
selected, disposed, and used can be made to play a very important part,
both in arousing interest in a subject and in satisfying it--in other
words in teaching it properly.
And first let us see what it may do to stimulate a general interest in
knowledge. Of late I have seen cropping out here and there what seems to
me a pedagogical heresy--the thesis that no kind of training is of
value in fitting the pupil for anything but the definite object that it
has in view. We can, according to this view, teach a boy to argue about
triangles, but this will not help him in a legal or business discussion.
We may teach him to solve equations, and he will then be an
equation-solver--nothing else. We may teach him to read Greek and he
will then be some sort of a Greek scholar, but his reaction to other
attempts to teach him will not be affected. Anything like a general
training is a contradiction in terms. If this is true, a great part of
what I am saying is foolish, but I do not believe it. Doubtless we have
exaggerated the effect of certain kinds of training. The old college
graduate who, having been through four years of Latin, Greek, and
mathematics, considered himself able with slight additional training, to
undertake to practice law or medicine or manage a parish, was probably
too sanguine. Yet I refuse to believe that a man’s brain is so shut off
in knowledge-tight compartments that one may exercise one part of it
without the slightest effect on the others. I cannot now write with my
toes, but I am sure that I could learn to do so much more quickly
because I know how to use my fingers for the purpose.
And it is indubitable, I think, that the best general preparation for
mental activity of whatever kind is contact with the minds of
others--early, late, and often. It tones up all one’s reactions--makes
him mentally stronger, quicker, and more accurate. Some children get
this at home, where there is a numerous family of persons who are both
thoughtful and mentally alert. Some meet at home, besides members of the
family, visitors who add to the variety of their contacts. Few get it in
school, with much variety. And it is futile to expect most of our
children to get it anywhere directly from persons. This being the case,
it is wonderfully fortunate that we have so many of the recorded souls
of human beings between the covers of books. With them mental contacts
may be numerous, wide, and easy. To interest a man in a stretch of
country take him up to a height whence he may overlook it. There is a
patch of woods, there a hill, there is a winding stream. He will see in
imagination the wild flowers under the trees, the windswept rocks behind
the hill, the trout in the stream. He will wonder, too, what unimagined
things there may be and he will long to find out. To interest a pupil in
a subject turn him loose in a room containing a hundred books about it.
He will browse about, finding a dozen things that he understands and a
hundred that he does not. He will get such a bird’s-eye view that his
stimulated imagination will long for closer acquaintance. And if you
want to interest him in the world of ideas in general, turn him loose in
a general library. The things that he will get are not to be ascertained
by an examination. They are intangible, but their results are not.
In an illuminating article on the events just preceding the present
European war, Professor Munroe Smith holds that it was precipitated
chiefly by bringing to the front at every step military rather than
diplomatic considerations. The trouble with military men, he says, is
that they take no account of “imponderables”--by which he means public
opinion, national feeling, injured pride, joy, grief--all those things,
intellectual and emotional, that cannot be expressed in terms of men,
guns, supplies, and military position. I have been wondering whether
some other technically trained persons--educators, for instance, do not
tend toward a similar neglect of imponderables, measuring educational
values solely in terms of hours, and units, and the passing of
examinations. It is a fault common to all highly trained specialists.
The Scripture has a phrase for it, as for most things--“ye neglect the
weightier matters of the law--judgment and faith.” These, you will note,
are to be classed with Professor Munroe Smith’s “imponderables,” whereas
mint, anise, and cummin are commercial products.
At least one noted educator, William James, did not make this error, for
he bids us note that the emotional “imponderable”--though he does not
use this word--possesses the priceless property of unlocking within us
unsuspected stores of energy and placing them at our disposal. “I thank
thee, Roderick, for the word,” says Fitz-James in “The Lady of the
Lake”: “it nerves my heart; it steels my sword.” One would hardly expect
to find educational psychology in Scott’s verse, but here it is. The
word that Roderick Dhu spoke (I forget just what it was, but I think he
called his rival a bad name) unlocked in Fitz-James an unexpected store
of reserve energy, and the result, as I recall it, was quite unfortunate
from the Gaelic point of view. We cannot afford to neglect the
imponderables; and it is their presence and their influence that are
fostered by a collection of books. If you will add together the weight
of leather, paper, glue, thread, and ink in a book you will get the
whole weight of the volume. There is naught ponderable left; and yet
what is left is all that makes the thing a book--all that has power to
influence the lives and souls of men--the imponderable part, fit for the
unlocking of energies.
I would not have you think, although I believe this to be at bottom a
matter of principles, that it is not possible to apply these principles
very directly and concretely in the daily practice of an educational
institution. I desire to call your attention for a moment to the
testimony of one who has had great experience and practice in the
administration of a collection of books in such an institution and in
their use for the purposes already outlined--Mr. Frederick C. Hicks,
assistant librarian of Columbia University, New York City, from whose
recent review article on this subject I propose to quote a few
paragraphs. Mr. Hicks is writing primarily of college instruction, but,
as he notes in the first paragraph that I shall quote, what he says
applies with equal cogency to the secondary school. He writes:
The general tendency in all instruction today, including even that
in preparatory and high schools, is from what may be called the
few-book method to the many-book method--a recognition of the power
of the printed page for which librarians have always stood sponsor.
The lecture, note-taking, text-book and quiz method of instruction
is fast passing away in undergraduate as well as in graduate study.
Textbooks are still in use in undergraduate and Master of Arts
courses, but they have been relegated to a subordinate position.
Emphasis is laid on work done and the assimilation of ideas
gathered from many sources rather than upon memorizing the treatise
of one author. Necessarily, references are chiefly to easily
accessible works of secondary authority, and reading instead of
research is the objective.
From the library point of view, the growth of the laboratory or
case method of instruction appears to be an independent phenomenon.
It should be noticed, however, that coincident with it is the
general tendency to adopt a policy of teaching each subject with
emphasis on its relations to other subjects.
Most universities now give courses for which no textbook is
available. For instance, Professor Frederick J. Turner, of Harvard
University, announces in a syllabus of 116 pages that there is no
textbook suitable for use in his course on the History of the West
in the United States. He thereupon gives citations to about 2,100
separate readings contained in 1,300 volumes, and says that his
course requires not less than 120 pages of reading per week in
these books. Professor James Harvey Robinson’s course in Columbia
University on the History of the Intellectual Class in Western
Europe has no textbook; and the reading for a class of 156 students
is indicated in a pamphlet of 53 pages, containing references to
301 books. Illustrations could be taken from almost any subject in
the university curriculum.
This is essentially a teacher’s view. Listen now to that of a public
librarian, Mr. John Cotton Dana, of Newark, New Jersey. He says:
In our high schools we spend literally millions of dollars to equip
laboratories, kitchens, carpenter shops, machine shops, and what
not, to be used by a small part of the pupils for a small part of
the short school day. This is partly because so to do is the
fashion of the hour, partly also because the products of work in
those shops, kitchens, and laboratories can be seen, touched, and
handled, are real things even to the most unintelligent.
For books, the essential tools of every form of acquisition, we
spend, outside of textbooks, a few paltry thousands. The things a
child makes we can see, and we are impressed by them; the knowledge
he gains, the power of thought he acquires--these cannot be made
visible and are not appreciated by the ignorant; they can only be
certified to by the teacher and demonstrated by the student’s words
and deeds as he goes through life.
Mastery of print is mastery of world-knowledge. Our young people do
not have it. Surely they should be led to acquire it, and where
better than in the high schools? To aid them in this acquisition
the high schools, should have ample collections of books, and these
collections of books should become active teaching organisms
through the ministrations of competent librarians.
Of all teaching laboratories, there is one which is plainly of
supreme importance--that of books.
I trust that you are with me so far; for I am about to make a further
advance that experience teaches me is very difficult, except for
librarians. I am going to urge that your collection of books, when you
have made it, be put in charge of one who has studied the methods of
making the contents of books available to the reader--their shelving,
physical preparation, classification, cataloguing; the ways in which to
fit them to their users, to record their use, and to prevent their
abuse. This means a trained librarian.
In all departments where expert knowledge and skill are necessary it is
difficult to explain to a non-expert the reasons for this necessity and
exactly in what the expert knowledge consists. We are so accustomed to
accept the fact in certain departments that it passes there without
question. Unfortunately that is not the case with the selection and
administration of a library. Most persons understand quite well that
special training is necessary before one can practice law, or medicine,
or engineering. No one would undertake to drive a motor car or even ride
a bicycle without some previous experience; but it is quite usual to
believe that a collection of books may be administered and its use
controlled by totally untrained and inexperienced persons--a retired
clergyman, a broken-down clerk, a janitor, perhaps. I once asked a
young woman who came for advice about taking up library work what had
inclined her toward that particular occupation. She was quite frank with
me; she said: “Why, my father and mother didn’t think I was good for
anything else.” This estimate of the library is by no means confined to
the parents of would-be library workers. And even where it is recognized
that some training and experience are necessary in administering a large
public institution, there is a lingering feeling that a comparatively
small collection, like that in a school, needs no expert supervision.
The fact that there are in a school plenty of experts in other lines
seems to have been not without its effect on this attitude. “Why,
Professor Smith is one of the best chemists in the state; Miss Jones is
an acknowledged authority on oriental history; do you mean to tell me
that either of them would not make a perfectly satisfactory librarian?”
Which is something like saying, “Mr. Robinson is our foremost banker;
should he not be able to superintend the dyeing department in a textile
mill?” Or, “Rev. Mr. Jenkins is our most eloquent pulpit orator; he can
surely run the 2:15 express!”
Are my metaphors too violent? I think not. We are dealing here with
imponderables, as I have said, but the most imponderable thing of all,
and the most potent, is the human mind. To wield, concentrate, and
control our battery of energies we want a correlated energy--one whose
relations to them all are close and one who knows how to pull all the
throttles, turn all the valves, and operate all the mechanism that
brings them into play. It takes two years of hard work, nowadays, for a
college graduate to get through a library school, and it should not be
necessary to argue that during these two years he is working hard on
essentials and is assimilating material that the untrained man however
able, cannot possibly acquire in a few month’s casual association with a
library or from mere association with books, no matter how long or how
intimate. You will pardon me, I am sure, some further quotation from Mr.
Hicks’s illuminating article. After calling our attention to the fact
that the effort to meet changing conditions in instruction is purely
technical, he goes on:
The librarian stands in the position of an engineer to whom is
presented a task which by the methods of his profession he must
perform. Numerical growth, expansion, addition of new schools and
new subjects, and the introduction of the laboratory method by
which books are made actual tools for use, all mean to the
librarian more books, larger reading-rooms and more of them, a
large staff specialized and grouped into departments, the
supervision of a complicated system, and capable business
administration. These are all technical matters and are of
sufficient magnitude to require all of the time and strength of
those to whom they are entrusted....
In a reference library, open shelves, whether in department
libraries or in the general library, require much high-grade
library service. The reference librarian becomes a direct teacher
in the use of books and gives constant assistance not merely in
finding separate books but in dealing with the whole literature of
a subject....
The whole development from the few-book method to the many-book
method presupposes a system of reserve books. By this expression is
meant the placing of a collection of books behind an enclosure of
some kind from which they are given out by a library assistant for
use in the room. The reserve collections, continually changing in
accordance with the directions of instructors, are in reality
composite textbooks....
The mere clerical work of maintaining an efficient reserve system
is large, its success being dependent upon intelligent co-operation
between the teaching faculty and the library, but it involves also
a technical problem to be solved by the librarian. What relation
does the number of copies of a given reserve book bear to its use?
To put the question concretely, how many copies of a book are
required to supply a class of 200 students, all of whom must read
thirty pages of the book within two weeks?