The "possibility and duty," on the part of the children's
library, of being a moral force in the community, was discussed
by Clara W. Hunt in a paper presented at the Narragansett Pier
Conference of the A. L. A. in 1906. Seven years later, at the
Kaaterskill Conference in 1913, Miss Hunt again considered the
influence of children's libraries as a civic force. This later
paper, representing more fully her point of view, and embodying
her later experience, is here reprinted.
Clara Whitehill Hunt was born in Utica, N. Y., in 1871. She was
graduated from the Utica Free Academy in 1889, and from the New
York State Library School in 1898. From 1893 to 1896 she was a
public school principal in Utica. She organized work with
children in the Apprentices' Library, Philadelphia, in 1898, and
had charge of it in the Newark, N. J., Free Public Library from
1898 to 1902. Since 1903 she has been Superintendent of the
Children's Department of the Brooklyn Public Library. Miss Hunt
has been a lecturer and contributor to magazines on children's
literature, library work with children and related topics, and
has published a book on "What shall we read to the children?"
You are probably familiar with the story of the man who, being
asked by his host which part of the chicken he liked best replied
that "he'd never had a chance to find out; that when he was a boy
it was the fashion to give the grown people first choice, and by
the time he'd grown up the children had the pick, so he'd never
tasted anything but the drumstick."
It will doubtless be looked upon as heresy for a children's
librarian to own that she has a deal of sympathy for the
down-trodden adult of the present; that there have been moments
when she has even gone so far as to say an "amen"--under her
breath--to the librarian who, after a day of vexations at the
hands of the exasperating young person represented in our current
social writings as a much-sinned-against innocent, wrathfully
exploded, "Children ought to be put in a barrel and fed through
the bung till they are twenty-one years old!"
During the scant quarter century which has seen the birth and
marvelous growth of modern library work with children, the "new
education" has been putting its stamp upon the youth of America
and upon the ideas of their parents regarding the upbringing of
children. And it has come to pass that one must be very bold to
venture to brush off the dust of disuse from certain old saws and
educational truisms, such as "All play and no work make Jack a
mere toy," "No gains without pains," "We learn to do by doing,"
"Train up a child in the way he should go," and so on.
Our kindergartens, our playground agitators, our juvenile courts,
our child welfare exhibits are so persistently--and rightly
--showing the wrongdoing child as the helpless victim of heredity
and environment that hasty thinkers are jumping to the conclusion
that, since a child is not to blame for his thieving tendencies,
it is our duty, rather than punish, to let him go on stealing;
since it is a natural instinct for a boy to like the sound of
crashing glass and the exercise of skill needed to hit a mark, we
must not reprove him for throwing stones at windows; because a
child does not like to work, we should let him play--play all the
time.
The painless methods of the new education, which tend to make
life too soft for children, and to lead parents to believe that
everything a child craves he must have, these tendencies have had
their effect upon the production and distribution of juvenile
books, and have added to the librarian's task the necessity not
only of fighting against the worst reading, but against the third
rate lest it crowd out the best.
It is the importance of this latter warfare which I wish mainly
to discuss.
We children's librarians, in the past fifteen or twenty years,
have had to take a good many knocks, more or less facetious, from
spectators of the sterner sex who are worried about the
"feminization of the library," and who declare that no woman,
certainly no spinster, can possibly understand the nature of the
boy. Perhaps sometimes we are inclined to droop apologetic heads,
because we know that some women are sentimental, that they don't
all "look at things in the large," as men invariably do. In view,
however, of the record of this youthful movement of ours, we have
a right rather to swagger than to apologize.
The influence of the children's libraries upon the ideals, the
tastes, the occupations, the amusements, the language, the
manners, the home standards, the choice of careers, upon the
whole life, in fact, of thousands upon thousands of boys and
girls has been beyond all count as a civic force in America.
And yet, while teachers tell us that the opening of every new
library witnesses a substitution of wholesome books for "yellow"
novels in pupils' hands; while men in their prime remark their
infrequent sight of the sensational periodicals left on every
doorstep twenty years ago; while publishers of children's books
are trying to give us a clean, safe, juvenile literature, and
while some nickel novel publishers are even admitting a decline
in the sale of their wares; in spite of these evidences of
success, a warfare is still on, though its character is changing.
Every librarian who has examined children's books for a few years
back knows exactly what to expect when she tackles the
"juveniles" of 1913.
There will be a generous number of books so fine in point of
matter and makeup that we shall lament having been born too late
to read these in our childhood. The information and the taste
acquired by children who have read the best juvenile publications
of the past ten years is perfectly amazing, and those extremists
who decry the buying of any books especially written for children
are nearly as nonsensical as the ones who would buy everything
the child wishes.
But when one has selected with satisfaction perhaps a hundred and
fifty titles, one begins to get into the potboiler class--the
written-to-order information book which may be guaranteed to kill
all future interest in a subject treated in style so wooden and
lifeless; the retold classic in which every semblance to the
spirit of the original is lost, and the reading of which will
give to the child that familiarity which will breed contempt for
the work itself; the atrocious picture book modeled after the
comic supplement and telling in hideous daubs of color and
caricature of line the tale of the practical joker who torments
animals, mocks at physical deformities, plays tricks on parents,
teases the newlywed, ridicules good manners, whose whole aim, in
short, is to provoke guffaws of laughter at the expense of
someone's hurt body or spirit. There will be collections of folk
and fairy tales, raked together without discrimination from the
literature of people among whom trickery and cunning are the most
admired qualities; there will be school stories in which the
masters and studious boys grovel at the feet of the football
hero; in greater number than the above will be the stories
written in series on thoroughly up-to-date subjects.
I shall be much surprised if we do not learn this fall that the
world has been deceived in supposing that to Amundsen and Scott
belong the honor of finding the South Pole, or to Gen. Goethals
the credit of engineering the Panama Canal. If we do not discover
that some young Frank or Jack or Bill was the brains behind these
achievements, I shall wonder what has become of the ingenuity of
the plotter of the series stories--the "plotter" I say advisedly,
for it is a known fact that many of these stories are first
outlined by a writer whose name makes books sell, the outlines
then being filled in by a company of underlings who literally
write to order. When we learn, also, that an author who writes
admirable stories, in which special emphasis is laid upon fair
play and a sense of honor, is at the same time writing under
another name books he is ashamed to acknowledge, we are not
surprised at the low grade of the resulting stories.
With the above extremes of good and poor there will be quantities
on the border line, books not distinctly harmful from one
standpoint--in fact, they will busily preach honesty and pluck
and refinement, etc., but they will be so lacking in imagination
and power, in the positive qualities that go to make a fine book,
that they cannot be called wholly harmless, since that which
crowds out a better thing is harmful, at least to the extent that
it usurps the room of the good.
These books we will be urged to buy in large duplicate, and when
we, holding to the ideal of the library as an educational force,
refuse to supply this intellectual pap, well-to-do parents may be
counted upon to present the same in quantities sufficient to
weaken the mental digestion of their offspring beyond cure by
teachers the most gifted.
There are two principal arguments--so-called--hurled at every
librarian who tries to maintain a high standard of book
selection. One is the "I read them when I was a child and they
did me no harm" claim; the other, based upon the doggedly clung-
to notion that our ideal of manhood is a grown-up Fauntleroy,
infers that every book rejected was offensive to the children's
librarian because of qualities dangerously likely to encourage
the boy in a taste for bloodshed and dirty hands.
Now, in this day when parents are frantically protecting their
children from the deadly house fly, the mosquito, the common
drinking cup and towel; when milk must be sterilized and water
boiled and adenoids removed; when the young father solemnly bows
to the dictum that he mustn't rock nor trot his own baby-- isn't
it really matter for the joke column to hear the "did me no harm"
idea advanced as an argument? And yet it is so offered by the
same individual who, though he has survived a boyhood of mosquito
bites and school drinking cups, refuses to allow his child to
risk what he now knows to be a possible carrier of disease.
The "what was good enough for me is good enough for my children"
idea, if soberly treated as an argument in other matters of life,
would mean death to all progress, and it is no more to be treated
seriously as a reason for buying poor juvenile books than a
contention for the fetich doctor versus the modern surgeon, or
for the return to the foot messenger in place of electrical
communication.
It would be tactless, if not positively dangerous, if we
children's librarians openly expressed our views when certain
people point boastfully to themselves as shining products of
mediocre story book childhoods. So I would hastily suppress this
thought, and instead remind these people that, as a vigorous
child is immune from disease germs which attack a delicate one,
so unquestionably have thousands of mental and moral weaklings
been retarded from their best development by books that left no
mark on healthy children. In spite of the probability that there
are to-day alive many able-bodied men who cut their first teeth
on pickles and pork chops, we do not question society's duty to
disseminate proper ideas on the care and feeding of children.
Isn't it about time that we nailed down the lid of the coffin on
the "did me no harm" argument and buried the same in the depths
of the sea?
Another notion that dies hard is one assuming that, since the
children's librarian is a woman, prone to turn white about the
gills at the sight of blood--or a mouse--she can not possibly
enter into the feelings of the ancestral barbarian surviving in
the young human breast, but must try to hasten the child's
development to twentieth century civilization by eliminating the
elemental and savage from his story books.
If those who grow hoarse shouting the above would take the
trouble to examine the lists of an up-to-date library they might
blush for their shallowness, that they have been basing their
opinions on their memory of library lists at least twenty-five
years old.
We do not believe that womanly women and manly men are most
successfully made by way of silly, shoddy, sorry-for-themselves
girlhoods, or lying, swaggering, loafing boyhoods; and it is the
empty, the vulgar, the cheap, smart, trust-to-luck story, rather
than the gory one, that we dislike.
I am coming to the statement of what I believe to be the problem
most demanding our study today. It is, briefly, the problem of
the mediocre book, its enormous and ever-increasing volume. More
fully stated it is the problem of the negatively as the enemy of
the positively good; of the cultivation of brain laziness by
"thoughts-made-easy" reading. It is a republic's, a public school
problem, viz.: How is it possible to raise to a higher average
the lowest, without reducing to a dead level of mediocrity the
citizens of superior possibilities? Our relation to publisher and
parent, to the library's adult open shelves of current fiction
enter into the problem. The children's over-reading, and their
reluctance to "graduate" from juvenile books, these and many
other perplexing questions grow out of the main one.
I said awhile ago that the new education has had a tendency to
make life too soft for children, and to give to their parents the
belief that natural instincts alone are safe guides to follow in
rearing a child. I hope I shall not seem to be a good old times
croaker, sighing for the days when school gardens and folk
dancing and glee clubs and dramatization of lessons and beautiful
text-books and fascinating handicraft and a hundred other
delightful things were undreamed-of ways of making pleasant the
paths of learning. Heaven forbid that I should join the ranks of
those who carp at a body of citizens who, at an average wage in
America less than that of the coal miner and the factory worker,
have produced in their schools results little short of the
miraculous. To visit, as I have, classrooms of children born in
slums across the sea, transplanted to tenements in New York, and
to see what our public school teachers are making of these
children--the backward, the underfed, the "incorrigible," the
blind, the anaemic--well, all I can say is, I do not recommend
these visits to Americans of the stripe of that boastful citizen
who, being shown the crater of Vesuvius with a "There, you
haven't anything like that in America!" disdainfully replied,
"Naw, but we've got Niagara, and that'd put the whole blame thing
out!" For myself I never feel quite so disposed to brag of my
Americanism as when I visit some of our New York schools.
And yet, watching the bored shrug of the bright, well-born high
school child when one suggests that "The prince and the pauper"
is quite as interesting a story as the seventh volume of her
latest series, a librarian has some feelings about the lines-of-
least-resistance method of educating our youth, which she is glad
to find voiced by some of our ablest thinkers.
Here is what J. P. Munroe says: "Many of the new methods . . .
methods of gentle cooing toward the child's inclinations, of
timidly placing a chair for him before a disordered banquet of
heterogeneous studies, may produce ladylike persons, but they
will not produce men. And when these modern methods go as far as
to compel the teacher to divide this intellectual cake and
pudding into convenient morsels and to spoon-feed them to the
child, partly in obedience to his schoolboy cravings, partly in
conformity to a pedagogical psychology, then the result is sure
to be mental and moral dyspepsia in a race of milk-sops." How
aptly "spoon-fed pudding" characterizes whole cartloads of our
current "juveniles"!
Listen to President Wilson's opinion: "To be carried along by
somebody's suggestions from the time you begin until the time
when you are thrust groping and helpless into the world, is the
very negation of education. By the nursing process, by the
coddling process you are sapping a race; and only loss can
possibly result except upon the part of individuals here and
there who are so intrinsically strong that you cannot spoil
them."
Hugo Munsterberg is a keen observer of the product of American
schools, and contrasting their methods with those of his boyhood
he says: "My school work was not adjusted to botany at nine years
because I played with an herbarium, and at twelve to physics
because I indulged in noises with home-made electric bells, and
at fifteen to Arabic, an elective which I miss still in several
high schools, even in Brookline and Roxbury. The more my friends
and I wandered afield with our little superficial interests and
talents and passions, the more was the straight-forward
earnestness of the school our blessing; and all that beautified
and enriched our youth, and gave to it freshness and liveliness,
would have turned out to be our ruin, if our elders had taken it
seriously, and had formed a life's program out of petty caprices
and boyish inclinations."
And Prof. Munsterberg thrusts his finger into what I believe to
be the weakest joint in our educational armor when he says, "As
there is indeed a difference whether I ask what may best suit
the taste and liking of Peter, the darling, or whether I ask what
Peter, the man, will need for the battle of life in which nobody
asks what he likes, but where the question is how he is liked,
and how he suits the taste of his neighbors."
What would become of our civilization if we were to follow merely
the instincts and natural desires? Yet is there not in America a
tremendous tendency to the notion, that except in matters of
physical welfare, the child's lead is to be followed to extreme
limits? Don't we librarians feel it in the pressure brought to
bear upon us by those who fail to find certain stories, wanted by
the children, on our shelves? "Why, that's a good book," the
parent will say, "The hero is honest and kind, the book won't
hurt him any--in fact it will give the child some good ideas."
"Ideas." Yes, perhaps. There is another educator I should like to
quote, J. H. Baker in his "Education and life." "Whatever you
would wish the child to do and become, that let him practice. We
learn to do, not by knowing, but by knowing and then doing.
Ethical teaching, tales of heroic deeds, soul-stirring fiction
that awakens sympathetic emotions may accomplish but little
unless in the child's early life the ideas and feelings find
expression in action and so become a part of the child's power
and tendency. . ."
Now we believe with G. Stanley Hall that, "The chief enemy of
active virtue in the world is not vice but laziness, languor and
apathy of will;" that "mind work is infinitely harder than
physical toil;" that (as another says) "all that does not rouse,
does not set him to work, rusts and taints him the disease of
laziness destroys the whole man."
And when children of good heritage, good homes, sound bodies,
bright minds, spend hours every week curled up among cushions,
allowing a stream of cambric-tea literature gently to trickle
over their brain surfaces, we know that though the heroes and
heroines of these stories be represented as prodigies of industry
and vigor, our young swallowers of the same are being reduced to
a pulp of brain and will laziness that will not only make them
incapable of struggling with a page of Quentin Durward, for
example, but will affect their moral stamina, since fighting
fiber is the price of virtue.
Ours is, as I have said, a public education, a republic's
problem. To quote President Wilson again: "Our present plans for
teaching everybody involve certain unpleasant things quite
inevitably. It is obvious that you cannot have universal
education without restricting your teaching to such things as
can be universally understood. It is plain that you cannot impart
'university methods' to thousands, or create 'investigators' by
the score, unless you confine your university education to
matters which dull men can investigate, your laboratory training
to tasks which mere plodding diligence and submissive patience
can compass. Yet, if you do so limit and constrain what you
teach, you thrust taste and insight and delicacy of perception
out of the schools, exalt the obvious and merely useful things
above the things which are only imaginatively or spiritually
conceived, make education an affair of tasting and handling and
smelling, and so create Philistia, that country in which they
speak of 'mere literature.' "
In our zeal to serve the little alien, descendant of generations
of poverty and ignorance, let us not lose sight of the importance
to our country of the child more fortunate in birth and brains.
So strong is my feeling on the value of leaders that I hold we
should give at least as much study to the training of the
accelerate child as we give to that of the defective. Though I
boast the land of Abraham Lincoln and Booker Washington I do not
give up one iota of my belief that the child who is born into a
happy environment, of parents strong in body and mind, holds the
best possibilities of making a valuable citizen; and so I am
concerned that this child be not spoiled in the making by a
training or lack of training that fails to recognize his
possibilities.
It is encouraging to kind growing attention in the "Proceedings"
of the N. E. A. and other educational bodies to the problem of
the bright child who has suffered by the lock-step system which
has molded all into conformity with the capabilities of the
average child.
The librarian's difficulty is perhaps greater than that of the
teacher, because open shelves and freedom of choice are so
essential a part of our program. We must provide easy reading for
thousands of children. Milk and water stories may have an actual
value to children whose unfavorable heritage and environment have
retarded their mental development. But the deplorable thing is to
see young people, mercifully saved from the above handicaps,
making a bee line for the current diluted literature for
grown-ups, (as accessible as Scott on our open shelves) and to
realize that this taste, which is getting a life set, is the
inevitable outcome of the habit of reading mediocre juveniles.
We must not rail at publishers for trying to meet the demands of
purchasers. Our job is to influence that demand far more than we
have done as yet. Large book jobbers tell us that millions and
millions of poor juveniles are sold in America to thousands of
the sort we librarians recommend. I have seen purchase lists of
boys' club directors and Sunday School library committees calling
for just the weak and empty stuff we would destroy. I have
unwittingly been an eavesdropper at Christmas book counters and
have heard the orders given by parents and the suggestions made
by clerks. And I feel that the public library has but skirmished
along the outposts while the great field of influencing the
reading of American children remains unconquered. Until we affect
production to the extent that the book stores circulate as good
books as the best libraries we cannot be too complacent about our
position as a force in citizen making.
An "impossible" ideal, of course, but far from intimidating, the
largeness of the task makes us all the more determined.
This paper attempts no suggestion of new methods of attacking the
problem. It is rather a restatement of an old perplexity. I harp
once more on a worn theme because I think that unless we
frequently lift our eyes from the day's absorbing duties for a
look over the whole field, and unless we once and again make
searching inventory of our convictions, our purposes, our
methods, our attainments, we are in danger of letting ourselves
slip along the groove of the taken-for-granted and our work loses
in power as we allow ourselves to become leaners instead of
leaders. May we not, as if it were a new idea, rouse to the
seriousness of the mediocre habit indulged in by young people
capable of better things? Should not our work with children reach
out more to work with adults, to those who buy and sell and make
books for the young? Is it not time for the successful teller of
stories to children to use her gifts in audiences of grown
people, persuading these molders of the children's future of the
reasonableness of our objection to the third rate since it is the
enemy of the best? May it not be politic, at least, for the
librarian to descend from her disdainful height and make friends
with "the trade," with bookseller and publisher who, after all,
have as good a right to their bread and butter as the librarian
paid out of the city's taxes?
And then--is it not possible that we might be better librarians
if we refused to be librarians every hour in the day and half the
night as well? What if we were to have the courage to refuse to
indulge in nervous breakdowns, because we deliberately plan to
play, and to eat, and to sleep, to keep serene and sane and
human, believing that God in His Heaven gives His children a
world of beauty to enjoy as well as a work to do with zeal. If we
lived a little longer and not quite so wide, the gain to our
chosen work in calm nerves and breadth of interest and sympathy
would even up for dropping work on schedule time for a symphony
concert or a country walk or a visit with a friend--might even
justify saving the cost of several A. L. A. conferences toward a
trip to Italy!
This hurling at librarians advice to play more and work less
reminds me of a story told by a southern friend. Years ago, in a
sleepy little Virginia village, there lived two characters
familiar to the townspeople, whose greatest daily excitement was
a stroll down to the railroad station to watch the noon express
rush through to distant southern cities. One of these personages
was the station keeper, of dry humor and sententious habit, whom
we will call Hen Waters; the other was the station goat, named,
of course, Billy. Year after year had Billy peacefully cropped
the grass along the railroad tracks, turning an indifferent ear
to the roar of the daily express, when suddenly one day the
notion seemed to strike his goatish mind that this racket had
been quietly endured long enough. With the warning whistle of the
approaching engine, Billy, lowering his head, darted furiously up
the track, intending to butt the offending thunderer into Kingdom
Come. When, a few seconds later, the amazed spectators were
gazing after the diminishing train, Hen Waters, addressing the
spot where the redoubtable goat had last been seen, drawled out:
"Billy, I admire your pluck--but darn your discretion!"
The parallel between the the ambitions and the futility of the
goat, and the present speaker's late advice is so obvious that
only the illogicalness of woman can account for my cherishing a
hope that I may be spared the fate of the indiscreet Billy.