The following paper embodies practical suggestions for helping to
give the children's room a "natural, friendly atmosphere." It was
read by Miss Clara W. Hunt before the Long Island Library Club,
February 19, 1903. A sketch of Miss Hunt appears on page 135.
So many of the problems of discipline in a children's room would
cease to be problems if the material conditions of the room
itself were ideal, that I shall touch first upon this, the less
important branch of my subject. For although the height of a
table and width of an aisle are of small moment compared with the
personal qualifications of the children's librarian, yet since it
is possible for us to determine the height of a table, when mere
determining what were desirable will not insure its production
where a human personality is concerned, it is practical to begin
with what there is some chance of our attaining. And the question
of fitting up the room properly is by no means unimportant, but
decidedly the contrary. For, given a children's librarian who is
possessed of the wisdom of Solomon, the patience of Job, the
generalship of Napoleon, and put her into a room in which every
arrangement is conducive to physical discomfort, and even such a
paragon will fail of attaining that ideal of happy order which
she aims to realize in her children's reading room. The temper
even of an Olympian is not proof against uncomfortable
surroundings.
Children are very susceptible, though unconsciously to
themselves, to physical discomfort. You may say you do not think
so, for you know they would sit through a whole morning and
afternoon at school without taking off their rubbers, if the
teacher did not remind them to do it, and so, you argue, this
shows that they do not mind the unpleasant cramped feeling in the
feet which makes a grown person frantic. But while the child
himself cannot tell what is wrong with him, the wise teacher
knows that his restlessness and irritability are directly
traceable to a discomfort he is not able to analyze, and so the
cause is not removed without her oversight. While the children's
librarian will not have the close relations with the boys and
girls that their school-teachers have, she may well learn of the
latter so to study what will make for the child's comfort, that,
in the perfect adaptation of her room to its work, half the
problems of discipline are solved in advance.
Let us suppose that the librarian is to have the satisfaction of
planning a new children's room. In order to learn what
conveniences to adopt and what mistakes to avoid, she visits
other libraries and notes their good and weak points. She will
soon decide that the size of a room is an important factor in the
question of discipline. Let a child who lives in a cramped little
flat where one can hardly set foot down without stepping on a
baby come into a wide, lofty, spacious room set apart for
children's reading, and, other conditions in the library being as
they should the mere effect of the unwonted spaciousness will
impress him and have a tendency to check the behavior that goes
with tenement- house conditions. We of the profession are so
impressed with the atmosphere that should pervade a library, that
a very small and unpretentious collection of books brings our
voices involuntarily to the proper library pitch. But this is not
true to the small arab, who, coming from the cluttered little
kitchen at home to a small, crowded children's room where the
aisles are so narrow that the quickest way of egress is to crawl
under the tables, sees only the familiar sights--disorder,
confusion, discomfort --in a different place, and carries into
the undignified little library room the uncouth manners that are
the rule at home. In planning a new children's room then, give it
as much space as you can induce the librarian, trustees, and
architects to allow. Unless you are building in the North Woods,
or the Klondike or the Great American Desert you will never have
any difficulty in getting small patrons enough to fill up your
space and keep the chairs and tables from looking lonesome.
The question of light has a direct bearing on the children's
behavior. Ask any school teacher, if you have never had occasion
to notice it yourself, which days are the noisiest in her
school-room, the bright, sunny ones, or the dingy days when it is
difficult to see clearly across the room. Ask her if the pencils
don't drop on the floor oftener, if small feet do not tramp and
scrape more, if chairs don't tip over with louder reports, if
tempers are not more keenly on edge, on a dark day than a bright
one. I need not say "yes," for one hundred out of a hundred will
say it emphatically. So, if you cannot have a room bright with
sunshine, do at least be lavish with artificial light, for your
own peace of mind.
Floors rendered noiseless by some good covering help wonderfully
to keep voices pitched low. I have seen this illustrated almost
amusingly in Newark, where frequent visits of large classes were
made from the schools to the public library. The tramp of forty
or fifty pairs of feet in the marble corridors made such a noise
that the legitimate questions and answers of children and
librarian had to be given in tones to be heard over the noise of
the feet. The change that came over the voices and faces as the
class stepped on the noiseless "Nightingale" flooring of the
great reading room was almost funny. The feet made no noise,
therefore it was not necessary to raise the voice to be heard,
and no strictures of attendants were needed to maintain quiet in
that room.
Under the head of furniture I will give only one or two hints of
things worth remembering. One is that whatever you decide upon
for a chair, in point of size, shape, or style, make sure, before
you pay your bill, that it cannot be easily overturned. If you
have a chair that will tip over every time a child's cloak swings
against it, your wrinkles will multiply faster than your years
warrant. And reason firmly with your electrician if he has any
plan in mind of putting lamps on your tables of such a sort that
they positively invite the boy of a scientific (or Satanic) turn
of mind to astonish the other children by the way the lights
brighten and go out, all because he has discovered that a gentle
pressure to his foot on the movable plug under the table can be
managed so as to seem purely innocent and accidental while he
sits absorbed in the contents of his book. I would also ask why
it is that librarians think we need so MUCH furniture, when our
rooms are as small as they sometimes are? We seem to think it
inevitable that the floor space should be filled up with tables,
but, as Mr. Anderson remarked in his paper at Magnolia, if we saw
a family at home gathered around the table, leaning their elbows
upon it and facing the light, we should think it a very unnatural
and unhygienic position to adopt. Why should we, in the library,
encourage children to do just what physiologists tell us they
should not do? Why provide tables at all for any but those
actually needing them as desks for writing up their reference
work? For the many who come merely to read, why is not a chair
and a book, with light on the page of the book, and not glaring
into the child's eyes, enough for his comfort? This is worth
thinking about, I am sure, and worked out in some satisfactory,
artistic little back-to-back benches perhaps, would change the
stereotyped appearance of the children's room, and give the extra
floor space which is always sadly needed. It is an axiom in
library architecture that perfect supervision should be made
easily possible. In a children's room this should be taken very
literally. There should be no floor cases, no alcoves in the
room, no arrangements by which a knot of small mischief makers
can conceal themselves from the librarian for she will find such
an error in planning, a thorn in the flesh as long as the room
stands.
So much time devoted to the planning of the children's room, may
give the impression that the room is of more importance than the
librarian. It is a platitude, however, to say that the ideal
children's librarian, with every material condition against her,
will do a thousand times more than the ideal room with the wrong
person in it. The qualifications necessary to make the right sort
of a disciplinarian are, many of them, too intangible for words,
but a few things strike me as not always distinctly recognized by
librarians.
In the first place, no librarian should compel that member of his
staff who dislikes children to do the work of the children's
department. While on general principles to let an attendant
choose the work she likes to do would be disastrous, since the
person best fitted for dusting might choose to be reference
librarian, in this one particular at any rate, the wishes of the
staff should be consulted. For while all may be conscientious,
faithful workers wherever placed, mere conscientiousness will not
make a person who frankly says children bore and annoy her, a
success in the children's room. Love for children should be the
first requisite, and the librarian who puts a person in charge of
that work against her will, will hurt the department in a way
that will be surely felt sooner or later. While love for
children, sympathy with, and understanding of them are all of the
first importance in the composition of a children's librarian,
some experience in handling them in large numbers (as in public
school teaching, mission schools, boys' clubs, etc.) is
extremely desirable. To deal with a mob of very mixed youngsters
is a different matter from telling stories to a few well-brought
up little ones in your own comfortable nurseries. The best
qualification for the work of children's librarian is successful
experience as a teacher, in these happy days when it is coming to
be the rule that law and liberty may walk side by side in the
school-room, and where firmness on the teacher's part in no wise
interferes with friendliness on the child's.
The children's librarian should have the sort of nerves that are
not set on edge by children. This does not mean that she may not
be a nervous person in other ways, indeed she must be, for the
nerveless, jelly-fish character can never be a success in dealing
with children. But I have seen people of highly nervous
organization who were really unconscious of the ceaseless tramp,
tramp, of the children's feet, the hum and clatter and moving
about inevitable in a children's library. Visitors come into the
room and say to such a person, "How can you stand this for many
minutes at a time?" and the librarian looks round in surprise at
the idea of there being anything hard to bear when she hears only
the little buzz that means to her hundreds of little ones at the
most susceptible age, eagerly, happily absorbing the ennobling
ideals, the poetic fancies, the craving for knowledge that are
going to make them better men and women than they would have been
without this glimpse into the realms beyond their daily
surroundings.
To attempt to enumerate, one by one, the qualities that combine
to make a wise and successful disciplinarian would be fruitless.
We can talk endlessly about what OUGHT to be. The most practical
thing to do to obtain such a person, is not to take a raw subject
and pour advice upon her in hopes she will develop some day, but
to hunt till you find the right one and then offer her salary
enough to get her for your library. And this suggests a subject
worthy of future discussion, that head librarians should reckon
this to be a profession within our profession, just as the
kindergartner is a specialist within the teaching body, demanding
a higher type of training than is the rule, and PAYING THE PRICE
TO GET IT.
Just a word about what degree of order and quiet to expect, and
to work for, in a children's room. Are we to try to maintain that
awful hush that sends cold chills down the spine of the visitor
on his first entering a modern reading room, and tempts him to
back out in fright lest the ticking of his watch may draw all
eyes upon him?
I should be very sorry to have a children's room as perfectly
noiseless as a reading room for adults. It is so unnatural for a
roomful of healthy boys and girls to be absolutely quiet for long
periods that if I found such a state of affairs I should be sure
something was wrong--that all spontaneity was being repressed,
that that freedom of the shelves which is a great educator was
being denied because moving about makes too much noise, that the
question and answer and comment which mark the friendly
understanding between librarian and child, and which make a good
book circulate because one boy tells another that it is good,
were done away with in order that no slight noise might be heard.
If there were such a thing as a meter to register sound to be
hung in a children's room beside the thermometer, I should not be
alarmed if it indicated a pretty high degree, provided I could
look around the room and observe the following conditions: a
large room, full of contented children, no one of whom was
wilfully noisy or annoying, most of them being quietly reading,
the ones who were moving about asking in low tones the children's
librarian or each other, perfectly legitimate questions that were
to help them choose the right thing. It is inevitable that heavy
boots, young muscles that have not learned self-control, the
joyous frankness of childhood that does not think to keep its
eager happiness over a good "find" under decorous restraint, will
result in more actual noise than obtains in the adults' reading
room. And yet, while the "sound meter" of the children's room
would register farther up, it might really be more orderly than
the other room, for every child might be using his room as it was
intended to be used, while the adult department might contain a
couple of women who came in for the express purpose of visiting,
and yet who knew how to whisper so softly as not to be invited to
retire. We must remember that, if children make more noise, they
do not mind each other's noise as adults do. The dropping of a
book or overturning of a chair, the walking about do not disturb
the young student's train of thought; and while I do not wish to
be quoted as advocating a noisy room, but on the contrary would
work for a quiet one, day in and day out, I do feel that
allowances must be made for noises that are not intended to be
annoying, and that we should not sacrifice to the ideal of
deathly stillness the good we hope to do through the child's love
for the room in which he feels free to express himself in a
natural, friendly atmosphere.