Dreaming of Utopia, an English writer of romance evolved a plan for
a people's palace, centering under one roof the pleasures and the
interests and the hopes of democracy. Far away, if not improbable,
as seemed the fruition of his dream, he lived to see prophecy merge
in realization. Were this lover of mankind still living, he would
know that his concept, though he saw it carried into being, had not
permanence in the form he gave it. Ideals cannot be bounded by the
narrow confines of four walls. And yet he had the vision of the seer,
for that which he pictured in local form with definite limitations
has, in a direction little dreamed of then, assumed form and substance
in a great world movement. Not only in great hives of industry, where
thousands congregate in daily toil, but in the small industrial hamlets
and in the rural towns that dot the land lie the possibilities for
many such palaces of the people, and in many--very many--of such
communities today exist the beginnings that will combine and cement
their many-sided interests.
This great world movement which is gathering accelerated momentum with
its own marvelous growth, we call library extension. That term is
perhaps sufficiently descriptive, though it gives name rather to the
means used than to the results sought to be achieved. For certainly its
underlying principle is of the very essence of democracy. There is no
other governmental enterprise--not excepting the public schools--that
so epitomizes the spirit of democracy. For democracy in its highest
manifestation is not that equality that puts mediocrity and idleness
on the same level with talent and genius and thrift, but that equality
which gives _all_ members of society an equal opportunity in life--that
yields to no individual as a birthright chances denied to his fellow.
And surely if there is any institution that represents this fundamental
principle and carries out a policy in consonance, it is the public
library. Neither condition nor place of birth, nor age, nor sex, nor
social position, serves as bar of exclusion from this house of the open
door, of the cordial welcome, of the sympathetic aid freely rendered.
In myriad ways not dreamed of at its inception, library extension has
sought channels of usefulness to reach all the people. The traveling
library in rural regions, the branch stations in congested centers of
population, the children's room, the department of technology, are a
few of these--to mention the ones which occur most readily to mind.
But these allied agencies do but touch the edge of opportunity. The
immediate concern of those engaged in library extension must be with
the forces reaching the adult population, and especially the young men
and women engaged in industrial pursuits. For the mission of the public
library is two-fold--an aid to material progress of the individual and
a cultural influence in the community through the individual. Perhaps
it may be said more accurately that the one mission is essential to
give scope for the second. For, first of all, man must needs minister
to his physical wants. Before there can be intellectual expansion and
cultural development, there must be leisure, or at least conditions
that free the mind from anxious care for the morrow. So the social
structure after all must rest upon a bread-and-butter foundation. It
follows as a logical conclusion that society as a whole cannot reach
a high stage of development until all its individual members are
surrounded with conditions that permit the highest self-development.
Until a better agency shall be found, it is the public library which
must serve this need. And therein lies the most potent reason for the
extension of its work into every field, whether intimately or remotely
affiliated, which can bring about these purposes. Its work with
children is largely important to the extent that habits are formed and
facility acquired in methods that shall be utilized in years succeeding
school life. But its great problem is that of adult education. What an
enormous field still lies untilled, we learn with startling emphasis
from figures compiled by the government. Despite the fact that
provision is made by state and municipality to give to every individual
absolutely without cost an education embracing sixteen years of life,
there are retarding circumstances that prevent all but a mere fraction
of the population from enjoying these advantages in full measure.
To quote a summary printed last year, "in the United States 16,511,024
were receiving elementary education during the year 1902-03; only
776,635 attained to a secondary education, and only 251,819 to the
higher education of the colleges, technical schools, etc. Stated in
simpler terms, this means that in the United States for one person who
receives a higher education, or for three who receive the education
of the secondary schools, there are sixty-five who receive only an
elementary education, and that chiefly in the lowest grades of the
elementary schools."
What gives further meaning to this statistical recital is the force of
modern economic conditions. From an agricultural we are developing into
a manufacturing people, with enormous influx from the rural into the
urban communities. The tremendous expansion of our municipalities has
brought new and important problems. Within the lifetime of men today a
hundred cities have realized populations in excess of that which New
York City had when they were boys. Vast numbers of immigrants differing
radically in intelligence and in education from earlier comers are
pouring into the country annually. It has been pointed out that some of
the largest Irish, German and Bohemian cities in the world are located
in the United States, not in their own countries. In one ward in the
city of Chicago forty languages are spoken by persons who prattled at
their mother's knee one or the other of them.
"The power of the public schools to assimilate different races to
our own institutions, through the education given to the younger
generation, is doubtless one of the most remarkable exhibitions of
vitality that the world has ever seen," says Dr. John Dewey in an
address on "The School as a Social Center." "But, after all, it
leaves the older generation still untouched, and the assimilation of
the younger can hardly be complete or certain as long as the homes
of the parents remain comparatively unaffected. Social, economic and
intellectual conditions are changing at a rate undreamed of in past
history. Now, unless the agencies of instruction are kept running
more or less parallel with these changes, a considerable body of men
is bound to find itself without the training which will enable it to
adapt itself to what is going on. It will be left stranded and become
a burden for the community to carry. The youth at eighteen may be
educated so as to be ready for the conditions which will meet him
at nineteen; but he can hardly be prepared for those which are to
confront him when he is forty-five. If he is ready for the latter when
they come, it is because his own education has been keeping pace in
the intermediate years."
And again: "The daily occupations and ordinary surroundings of life
are much more in need of interpretation than ever they have been
before. Life is getting so specialized, the divisions of labor are
carried so far that nothing explains or interprets itself. The
worker in a modern factory who is concerned with a fractional piece
of a complex activity, presented to him only in a limited series of
acts carried on with a distinct position of a machine, is typical
of much in our entire social life. Unless the lives of a large part
of our wage earners are to be left to their own barren meagerness,
the community must see to it by some organized agency that they are
instructed in the scientific foundation and social bearings of the
things they see about them, and of the activities in which they are
themselves engaging."
Now if those who come in such limited numbers from the colleges and
universities, can keep step with the onward march of their fellows only
by constantly adding to their educational equipment, what shall be
said of that enormous army made up of conscripts from the ranks in the
elementary schools?--the tender hands that drop the spelling book and
seize the workman's dinner pail?
Thus we establish the duty of the state to its citizenship in providing
means for adult education. And herein lies a great opportunity for
library extension--not, indeed, in seeking to supplant agencies already
existent; not in creating new ones that will parallel others, but in
supplementing their work where such educational agencies do exist,
in supplying channels for their activities through its own greater
facilities for reaching the masses. Important as are the public museum,
the public art gallery, the popular lecture or lyceum feature, the
public debate associated with or incorporated in the library, of as
far-reaching importance is another and newer allied agency developed
in university extension. The response which has come in establishing
correspondence study as part of modern university extension is of
tremendous significance. The enrollment in correspondence schools of a
million grown-up men and women eager to continue their education, and
willing to expend more than fifty million dollars a year in furtherance
of that desire, is a factor that challenges attention. It is a new
expression of an old impulse. Eighty years ago the working people and
artisan classes of Great Britain took part in a similar movement. Its
beginning was prompted by a wish for technical instruction. Soon these
mechanics' institutes grew into social institutions, with collections
of books as a secondary interest. The institutes increased enormously
in number, until through their medium more than a million volumes a
year were circulated. Charles Knight issued his penny encyclopedia,
Robert and William Chambers led the way for inexpensive books, the
Society for the Diffusion of Knowledge came into existence. Industrial
England was for the time being the workshop of the world. And in the
later university extension movement which, along new lines, is to make
of universities having a state foundation really the instrument of the
state for the good of all the people in place of the few, the libraries
have a great opportunity to become an important factor. Millions of
the adult population will thus be given an opportunity to bring out
in its best form whatever of talent and of intellectual gift they may
possess. From a private letter written by Professor McConachie, of the
University of Wisconsin, who has charge of the correspondence study
in the department of science, are taken the following extracts: "Old
ways of teaching are breaking down. Library study and written exercises
are re-enforcing classroom recitations and lectures. Each pupil of a
term course studies one or two prescribed texts, reads and reports
in detail a minimum of eight or nine hundred pages in a choice shelf
collection of library books, takes and submits notes, writes brief
themes and prepares for weekly quizzes wherein the members of his class
section helpfully interchange ideas and information. The post-office
is the medium for extension from the university to a vaster body of
students everywhere throughout the state. The same materials--books,
periodicals, newspapers, and official documents,--that the student
of politics uses under the personal oversight of the university
instructor, are scattered in vast abundance everywhere. The state is
one great library. The largest single collection is paltry beside this
magnificent and ever-increasing supply of political literature that
permeates every hamlet. Civic intelligence has thriven upon the mere
haphazard and desultory reading of the people. Correspondence studies
will put their scattered material into shape for them and systematize
their use thereof." The library and the university may serve the
citizen by giving unity and direction to his reading, helping him to
hitherto hidden worth and meaning in the humblest literary material at
his hand, by quickening his interest alike in the offices, institutions
and activities that lie nearest to his daily life and in his world-wide
relationship with his fellowmen. For the citizen on the farm, at the
desk, or in the factory, they point the way out of vague realizations
into distinct and definite command of his political self, offer
refreshing change from the narrowing viewpoint of individual interest,
to the broadening viewpoint of his town or state or country, and lead
on to far international vistas of world-wide life and destiny.
Society has an interest in this beyond the rights of the individual.
The greatest waste to society is not that which comes from
improvidence, but from undeveloped or unused opportunity. So it
becomes the duty of every community to make its contribution to the
world, whether it be in the realm of invention, scientific discovery,
or literature. And how is this to be done if genius and talent are
allowed to die unborn for lack of opportunity to grow? Wonderful as
has been the progress of the world's knowledge during the last century
of scientific research, who will venture to say that it constitutes
more than a fraction of what might have been if all the genius that
remained dormant and unproductive could have been utilized? From what
we know of isolated instances where mere chance has saved to the
world great forces that make for the progress of humanity, we can
infer what might have been realized, under happier conditions. Every
librarian of experience, every administrator of traveling libraries,
will recall such instances. One boy comes upon the right book, and the
current of his life is changed; another reads a volume, and in his
brain germinates the seed that blossoms into a great invention; in a
chance hour of reading, a third finds in a page, a phrase, a word, the
inspiration whose expression sets aflame the world. A master pen has
vividly described the process:[2]
"Most of us who turn to any subject with love remember some morning
or evening hour when we got on a high stool to reach down an untried
volume. * * * When hot from play he would toss himself in a corner,
and in five minutes be deep in any sort of book that he could lay his
hands on; if it were Rasselas or Gulliver, so much the better, but
Bailey's Dictionary would do, or the Bible with the Apocrypha in it.
Something he must read when he was not riding the pony, or running and
hunting, or listening to the talk of men. * * * But, one vacation,
a wet day sent him to the small home library to hunt once more for
a book which might have some freshness for him. In vain! unless,
indeed, he first took down a dusty row of volumes with gray-paper
backs and dingy labels--the volumes of an old encyclopedia which he
had never disturbed. It would at least be a novelty to disturb them.
They were on the highest shelf, and he stood on a chair to get them
down; but he opened the volume which he took first from the shelf;
somehow one is apt to read in a makeshift attitude just where it
might seem inconvenient to do so. The page he opened on was under the
head of Anatomy, and the first passage that drew his eyes was on the
valves of the heart. He was not much acquainted with valves of any
sort, but he knew that valvæ were folding doors, and through this
crevice came a sudden light startling him with his first vivid notion
of finely-adjusted mechanism in the human frame. A liberal education
had, of course, left him free to read the indecent passages in the
school classics, but beyond a general sense of secrecy and obscenity
in connection with his internal structure, had left his imagination
quite unbiased, so that for anything he knew his brains lay in small
bags at his temples, and he had no more thought of representing to
himself how his blood circulated than how paper served instead of
gold. But the moment of vocation had come, and before he got down from
his chair the world was made new to him by a presentiment of endless
processes filling the vast spaces planked out of his sight by that
wordy ignorance which he had supposed to be knowledge. From that hour
he felt the growth of an intellectual passion."
And in this wise the world gained a great physician.
All this may be said without disparagement to that phase of library
usefulness which may be termed the recreative. There has been undue
and unreasoning criticism of the library tendency to minister to the
novel-reading habit. Many good people are inclined to decry the public
library because not all its patrons confine their loans to books
dealing with science, or with useful arts. In their judgment it is not
the legitimate function of the public library to meet the public demand
for fiction. These same good people would hardly urge that the freedom
of the public parks should be limited to those who wish to make
botanical studies. The pure joy in growing things and fresh air and
the song of uncaged birds, needs no knowledge of scientific terms in
botany and ornithology. These privileges are promotive of the physical
well-being of the people; correspondingly, healthy mental stimulus is
to be found in "a sparkling and sprightly story which may be read in
an hour and which will leave the reader with a good conscience and a
sense of cheerfulness." Our own good friend, Mr. John Cotton Dana, has
admirably epitomized the underlying philosophy:
"A good story has created many an oasis in many an otherwise arid
life. Many-sidedness of interest makes for good morals, and millions
of our fellows step through the pages of a story book into a broader
world than their nature and their circumstances ever permit them to
visit. If anything is to stay the narrowing and hardening process
which specialization of learning, specialization of inquiry and of
industry and swift accumulation of wealth are setting up among us, it
is a return to romance, poetry, imagination, fancy, and the general
culture we are now taught to despise. Of all these the novel is a
part; rather, in the novel are all of these. But a race may surely
find springing up in itself a fresh love of romance, in the high sense
of that word, which can keep it active, hopeful, ardent, progressive.
Perhaps the novel is to be, in the next few decades, part of the
outward manifestation of a new birth of this love of breadth and
happiness.
There is, then, no limitation to the scope of library extension save
that enforced by meagerness of resource and physical ability to do. In
the proper affiliation and correlation of all these forces which have
been enumerated and of others suggested by them, will develop that
process whereby the social betterment that today seems but a dream will
be brought into reality. The form this combination will assume need
give us no concern--whether its local physical expression shall be as
in Boston a group of buildings maintained as separate institutions;
or as in Pittsburgh, a complete, related scheme of activities covered
by one roof; as planned in Cleveland, a civic center with the public
library giving it character and substance; or as in New York, where
many institutions, remotely located but intimately associated, work
toward a common end. Many roads may lead to a common center. Which
one the wayfarer chooses is a matter of mere personal preference and
of no importance, so that he wends his way steadily onwards towards
the object of his attainment. In the evolution of these uplifting
processes, the book shall stand as symbol, as the printed page shall
serve as instrument.