Of all human interests that pertain to intellectual improvement--social
evolution, scientific achievement, educational progress, governmental
advance, or humanitarian endeavor, none has seemed too unimportant for
consideration by library workers. Librarians have sought to identify
their work with them all, to achieve contact with every individual,
with groups of individuals and with communities as a whole. If
intelligent method has sometimes seemed lacking, the enthusiasm and the
self-denial of the missionary have been given in unstinted measure. To
the home and to the mart, to the school and to the playground, to the
workshop and to the laboratory, they have brought--whether asked or
unsought--the best at their command.
Not out of abundance has the library attempted so much in such diverse
places. Its meager resources have been spread over such vast fields
that in spots the substance has seemed tenuous and transparent. Most
insufficient, and perhaps least successful thus far, but suggesting
the most important function of library activity and presaging its most
significant development, is that branch of service associated with
grammar and secondary schools. Here lies the most fertile field for
strong, vigorous, fruitful energizing of such forces as the library
possesses.
Curiously enough, a perception of values which inhere in the associated
and co-ordinated efforts of school and library has not, as yet, dawned
upon school men to any appreciable degree. Here and there, indeed, a
vibrant voice has demanded the joining of effort for practical ends,
but the teaching folk as a whole remain impervious to possibilities
even when sensible of the need. Nearly four centuries ago, Martin
Luther noted the possibilities of the library as an educational adjunct
and necessity, and urged the founding of public libraries for the
preservation and encouragement of learning.[4]
"No cost nor pains," he urged in the concluding pages of his letter to
the mayors of Germany, "should be spared to procure good libraries in
suitable buildings, especially in the large cities which are able to
afford it."
From his day to ours there appears in printed works on
education--whether general or dealing with specialized phases--no
recurrent note amplifying this suggestion, except a few casual fugitive
references in less than a dozen recent publications, and two treatises
that recognize the importance of the subject with some fulness of
treatment. Perhaps this sweeping characterization of stolid school-room
self-sufficiency should be modified by crediting to Horace Mann a
vision that scarcely survived his passing. A historian of educational
influences informs us that in Mr. Mann's work for teachers two aspects
are apparent--one dealing with preparation, the other with method.
Through his labors normal schools became a component part of our
school system, and institutes were started for the special training
of teachers. Furthermore, he made apparent the value of libraries as
school adjuncts, and brought about their establishment. And similarly
in backwoods Wisconsin, three-quarters of a century ago, Lyman Draper
sought to interest the teaching forces there. His report printed in the
50's--now rare and difficult to procure--is a grouping of opinions,
prophetic but yet unrealized, expressed by eminent men of the day as
foreshadowing a relationship of school and library.
A careful examination of fifty average books on education issued since
1870 yields but scant encouragement to those who seek association of
school and library. Six of the fifty writers give at least passing
consideration to the subject. Two cyclopedias of education recognize
the importance of the subject.[5]
Forty-two books issued between the years mentioned, and about equally
divided between the decades represented are wholly barren of such
mention. On the other hand, two are notable for vital grasp and broad
treatment--G. Stanley Hall's chapters in the second volume of his
"_Educational Problems_," and Hugo Müsterberg's chapter in "_The
Americans_."
Significant of present-day conditions is the testimony of a teacher,
who, addressing a library gathering, said:[6]
"In days gone by we carried on the school without libraries--we could
do this as well as not because education meant _learning by rote_;
text-book learning alone.
"This is, to my mind, the most important thing I have to say to
you--we do not yet know you and our need for you.
"In our school lives as children, in our normal training and later in
our actual teaching we have not had you, and we do not yet realize your
resources.
"To get this matter before you definitely, pardon my using my own case
as illustration.
"From beginning to end of my common school education--from the first
grade through eighth--I never saw a school or a public library. We had
none, though I lived in a good-sized city in the Middle West. I learned
what the text-book told me; no supplementary reading (or rarely), no
pictures, no objects. My training in reading and literature consisted
in learning to keep my toes on a crack and my voice from falling on a
question mark!
"In high school I had very little but the regular text. Again memory
work was the test. I remember well a boy who was my ideal. He learned
his geography word for word and so recited it. If he sneezed or a door
slammed and his flow of words (I use words advisedly) was interrupted,
he had to begin again. He was the show pupil in our class.
"In college our instructors in science performed all the experiments
for us while we looked on. When we went to the library we spoke to the
librarian through a wire netting, and in our company manners asked for
a book.
"In the normal school which I attended there was a so-called children's
library, but the books were all text-books, and we were not taught how
to help the children to use them. We had literature, but it was all
about Hamlet's being or not being mad; none of it was taught in a way
to make it a tool for the elementary teacher.
"After all this I began teaching, with no knowledge of the resources of
a library as an aid to either teacher or child, and I felt no need for
such aid. What is true of me is true of thousands of other teachers.
"You must make us feel our need for you. You must, if you please,
intrude yourselves upon our notice. Generations of teachers who have
worshipped at the shrine of the text-book can in no other way be
reached.
"The ideals of education today are broader, our needs are greater, and
you have the material to help us to realize our needs."
In the relatively few instances where co-operation between school
and library administration has led to installation of modern library
equipment in elementary schools, the difficulties have been experienced
which are usual when afterthought supplies what forethought neglects to
include. Quarters are ordinarily unsuitable and insufficient. Adequate
provision should be made when school buildings are planned, for library
quarters that are ample as to size and strategic as to location,
instead of depending for space upon a room or enlarged closet not
otherwise utilized, for library placement. Perhaps it is too optimistic
to hope for a change soon in the inconceivably stupid architecture and
design of school buildings, despite a few recent striking examples to
the contrary.
As now financed, no public library system can undertake to administer a
branch library in every grade school building within its jurisdiction.
For school service on such a liberal scale there would be required in
the city of New York at least $4,300,000 for equipment and at least
$537,000 annually for current maintenance; in Chicago, $2,350,000
for initial equipment and $294,000 annually for maintenance; in
other cities, correspondingly large expenditures. However, in most
of the major cities of the United States, it is entirely feasible to
make a reasonable beginning by introducing some features of the work
not now attempted, or tried in such meagre fashion as to be useless
and disheartening. As there are in many places traveling school
libraries, so there may well be added traveling school librarians. It
is imperative that for this service there must be sought a type of
teacher-librarian capable by reason of natural ability and education to
command the confidence of the teaching corps as a counselor, and of the
student body as a friendly element in the school, disassociated from
the thought of book use based on compulsion. A teacher-librarian so
qualified could exert an important influence in shaping the future of
the children.
In his inimitable, whimsical fashion, Bernard Shaw brings out with
sympathy and humor something of this spirit of compulsion which schools
typify:
"There is, on the whole, nothing on earth intended for innocent people
so horrible as a school. To begin with, it is a prison. But it is in
some respects more cruel than a prison. In a prison, for instance, you
are not forced to read books written by the warders and the governor
(who, of course, would not be warders and governors if they could
write readable books), and are therefore beaten or otherwise tormented
if you cannot remember their utterly unmemorable contents. In the
prison you are not forced to sit listening to turnkeys discoursing
without charm or interest on subjects that they don't understand and
don't care about, and are therefore incapable of making you understand
or care about. In a prison they may torture your body; but they do
not torture your brains; and they protect you against violence and
outrage from your fellow prisoners. In a school you have none of these
advantages. With the world's book-shelves loaded with fascinating and
inspired books--the very manna sent down from heaven to feed your
souls--you are forced to read a hideous imposture called a school
book, written by a man who cannot write; a book from which no human
being can learn anything; a book which, though you may decipher it,
you cannot in any fruitful sense read, though the enforced attempt
will make you loathe the sight of a book all the rest of your life. It
is a ghastly business, quite beyond words, this schooling."
The late Professor Norton is credited[7] with the statement that a
taste for literature is a result of cultivation more often than a
gift of nature, and that the years of the elementary school seem
to be the time in which the taste takes deepest root. Dr. Scott
Nearing[8] points out that the old education presupposed an average
child and then prepared a course of study which would fit his needs.
The new education, he contends, recognizes the absurdity of averaging
unlike quantities, and accepts the ultimate truth that each child is
an individual, differing in needs, capacity, outlook, energy, and
enthusiasm from every other child. An arithmetic average can be struck,
but when it is applied to children it is a hypothetical and not a real
quantity. There is not, and never will be, an average child; hence, a
school system planned to meet the needs of the average child fits the
needs of no child at all.
Rightly directed, library influences in elementary schools would modify
the machine-like formula giving to all children alike at the same time
the same mental food to eat and the same moral garb to wear. As Dr.
Bird T. Baldwin notes in his ingenious statement of the five ages of
childhood, school children are inevitably different; even when children
are born on the same day, the chances that they will grow physically,
mentally and morally at exactly the same rate, and will make exactly
the same progress in school, are remote indeed.
A teacher-librarian having special aptitude for the post could render
service of inestimable value to teachers as well as to their pupils, in
becoming the active medium between public school and public library.
By securing the right books from the library for home reading, by
providing picture material and reference sources for class room use,
by conducting story hours and reading clubs, by giving instruction in
the use of the library and the keys that open books, by giving stimulus
to the ambitions and capacities of individual pupils, by intimate
co-operation with the work of vocational guidance, the librarian would
prove her worth. Nor would the least useful function of the school
libraries be that of an evening study place for those tens of thousands
of children whose home conditions absolutely preclude thought of, or
opportunity for, study out of school hours.
It may be contended that these services are provided by branch
libraries and their juvenile departments. What are the facts? Early
in the present month twenty million boys and girls went more or less
willingly to school. Our consolidated library statistics show that
considerably less than one million of them use our public libraries.
Despite our imposing figures of circulation, we reach but 5 per cent of
the juvenile population.
If there are urgent reasons for increased library effort in connection
with grade schools, these apply with multiplied force as to high
schools. Here, indeed, the deterrent factor of enormous and prohibitive
cost would not obtain, because they are fewer in number; and in
proportion to total cost of maintenance, the added percentage of cost
would be comparatively small. There are in the United States 8,300
high schools with a four-year course, and 3,250 carrying a three-year
course. In every one of the 11,500 high schools there should be a
well-equipped and well-administered library. Preferably, those that
are located in cities where there are strong public libraries should
be conducted as branches of the local public library. Such management
would assure better administration. School management would imperil in
many instances the selection of librarians fitted for the task. Too
often, as experience has demonstrated, the governing body would assign
to the post derelict teachers unfitted by reason of age or physical
handicap, and unfortunate deficiencies in other respects. On the other
hand, public library authorities must recognize more tangibly than
they do now that high school librarians must possess not only library
training in the machinery of routine performance, but also university
education, teaching experience, and qualifications of personality and
temperament that will place them on a level with other members of the
faculty.
In the high schools we find the sifted grain of the elementary schools.
It is there that the potential qualities of originality and genius
which will later make their impress upon the course of industry and
government must be quickened and given direction. More and more it is
coming to be realized that to grasp without failure the complexities of
modern life native intelligence no longer suffices.
Intelligence must be sharpened by education and given power by
experience. The self-made man who achieved success untaught,
unlettered, and unaided save by his own efforts of hand and brain,
has become a legendary hero. Appreciation of changed conditions may
be found in the records of increased attendance in the high schools.
That increase has been at a greater rate than that of the population.
In 1890 there were but 59 pupils for every ten thousand inhabitants;
in 1895 there were 79; in 1900 there were 95; in 1910 there were 100;
and now the number is considerably in excess, statistics for 1914
showing 117. Thus, in twenty-five years, the percentage of high school
attendance has nearly doubled.
Again we find the school people without perception of the great value
which a properly conducted library would bring to a high school. In
his recently published book, "_The New Education_," Dr. Scott Nearing
describes an up-to-date high school:
"The modern high school," he says, "is housed in a building which
contains, in addition to the regular classrooms, gymnasiums, a swimming
tank, physics and chemical laboratories; cooking, sewing, and millinery
rooms; woodworking, forge, and machine shops; drawing rooms; a music
room; a room devoted to arts and crafts; and an assembly room. This
arrangement of rooms presupposes Mr. Gilbert's plan of making the high
school, like the community, an aggregation of every sort of people,
doing every sort of work."
When some of the foremost leaders in education leave out of a list
of desiderata for the high school what the universities have come to
regard as the very heart of the institution--the library--is there
marvel that the love of literature is being strangled in the schools?
Required reading of classics, and the use of literary masterpieces for
classroom dissection has taken away the pure joy of reading and made
the study of literature a mere literary autopsy. Here is the testimony
of a teacher who places herself on the witness stand:[9]
"Sometimes the high school course works as a sort of vaccination to
prevent their taking literature seriously.
"Most teachers of English have had at times the experience holding open
a volume of Shakespeare with one hand, while with the other they waved
some sort of scholastic rod over the head of a rebellious young modern.
Though 'classics' are probably swallowed with less forcible feeding
than grammar, spelling, and rhetoric, yet even those dilutable bits
of literature that have been considered food for the gods of culture
are gulped down wry-facedly by some barbarians. By judicious skimming
and cramming they may perforce capture the irreducible minimum of
scanty and fugitive facts about the masterpieces prescribed for their
edification; but at the first safe moment they joyously forget them,
and betake themselves to the cheaper theaters, the thrilling dailies,
and the popular novelists.
"The truth is that literature teachers are devoted champions of a lost
cause. Some of the dead authors appear to be so irrevocably dead that
no amount of artificial respiration can put any breath of life into
their works so far as the ordinary high school student is concerned.
"It would be enticingly easy to win over students to a course in
journalism, modern magazines, and contemporary novels and dramas.
"We cannot expect to overcome all the narrowing and even vulgarizing
influences that surround many of our young people; but at least we
should improve their judgment enough to make them reject the cheapest,
shallowest, and most distorted contemporary writings."
One chapter of Ernest Poole's story of "_The Harbor_" tells of his
school experience. A passage from it is worth quoting:
"What a desert of knowledge it was back there. Our placid tolerance
of the profs included the books they gave us. The history prof gave
us ten books of collateral reading. Each book, if we could pledge
our honor as gentlemen that we had read it, counted us five in
examination. On the night before the examination I happened to enter
the room of one of our football giants, and found him surrounded by
five freshmen, all of whom were reading aloud. One was reading a
book on Russia, another the life of Frederick the Great, a third was
patiently droning forth Napoleon's war on Europe, while over on the
window-seat the other two were racing through volumes one and two of
Carlyle's French Revolution. The room was a perfect babel of sound.
But the big man sat and smoked his pipe, his honor safe and the morrow
secure. In later years, whatever might happen across the sea would
find this fellow fully prepared, a wise, intelligent judge of the
world, with a college education."
Into the atmosphere of the school must be introduced some element
that will bring to the growing boys and girls a love of reading and
a genuine desire for absorbing those vital forces of life which
literature images. If we believe that the ultimate aim of education is
that of the ultimate aim of life, there must be that attention to the
individual need which in the end makes for the uplifting of all. To
that end the means must be wrought. If the school must deal perforce
with groups rather than with units, the methods of the library adapt
themselves to the converse plan of individual treatment. If the school
narrows the pathway by compulsion, the library gives the joy of freedom
unrestricted. Therein lies its potency, and therein does it make appeal
not to the few elect, but to the many. And herein lies its greater
service.
"Progress is
The law of life, man is not man as yet,
Nor shall I deem his object served, his end
Attained, his genuine strength put fairly forth,
While only here and there a star dispels
The darkness, here and there a towering mind
O'erlooks its prostrate fellows: when the host
Is out at once to the despair of night,
When all mankind alike is perfected,
Equal in full-blown powers--then, not till then,
I say, begins man's general infancy."
Wherefore this emphasis upon the school side of library work? Not,
of course, at the expense of the service which is furnished to young
and old in relief from the drab dullness of life, but parallel with
it, must the library labor. For here lies its mission of permanent
influences, and at no time has there been greater need.
Suddenly, the seemingly well-fortified pillars of civilization have
crumbled. Confused, dismayed, disheartened, society witnesses rapid
disintegration of foundations which centuries of patient endeavor have
constructed. Science, thought to be the instrument of man's weal, has
become the subtle and baleful agent of destruction. The racial hyphen,
long looked upon as the symbol of cohesion, has become the sign of
separation. The Christian nations of the earth are at each other's
throats with a ferocity and malignity unparalleled. Under a flag which
shelters ninety millions of individuals whose forebears peopled every
land upon the habitable globe, and who seek to merge the best of their
racial qualities in a common life that shall typify a new standard
of civilization, must be wrought that miracle of human evolution
which shall establish concord and good will between members of alien
races dwelling together. To effect this it must be demonstrated
that "assimilation is a matter of understanding and ideas, and not
merely of manners and customs." And so, despite the gloomy murk that
now envelops the world, we must realize the need of beginning the
reconstruction of our demolished ideals.
This is the day of readjustments. We must begin again, but we must
begin at the point of beginning, with the plastic mind of youth.
Happily, if not now, generations hence, the world may realize the
poet's prophecy, and the hope it holds:
"For no new sense puts forth in us but we
Enter our fellow's lives thereby the more.
And three great spirits with the spirit of man
Go forth to do his bidding. One is free,
And one is shackled, and the third, unbound,
Halts yet a little with a broken chain
Of antique workmanship, not wholly loosed,
That dangles and impedes his forthright way.
Unfettered, swift, hawk-eyed, implacable,
The wonder-worker, Science, with his wand,
Subdues an alien world to man's desires.
And Art with wide imaginative wings
Stands by, alert for flight, to bear his lord,
Into the strange heart of that alien world
Till he shall live in it as in himself
And know its longing as he knows his own.
Behind a little, where the shadows fall,
Lingers Religion with deep-brooding eyes,
Serene, impenetrable, transpicuous
As the all-clear and all-mysterious sky,
Biding her time to fuse into one act
Those other twain, man's right hand and his left.
For all the bonds shall be broken and rent in sunder,
And the soul of man go free
Forth with those three
Into the lands of wonder;
Like some undaunted youth,
Afield in quest of truth,
Rejoicing in the road he journeys on
As much as in the hope of journey done.
And the road runs east, and the road runs west,
That his vagrant feet explore;
And he knows no haste and he knows no rest,
And every mile has a stranger zest
Then the miles he trod before;
And his heart leaps high in the nascent year
When he sees the purple buds appear:
For he knows, though the great black frost may blight
The hope of May in a single night,
That the spring, though it shrink back under the bark,
But bides its time somewhere in the dark--
Though it come not now to its blossoming,
By the thrill in his heart he knows the spring;
_And the greater to-morrow is on its way_".
It shall keep with its roses yet in June;
And the promise it makes perchance too soon,
_For the ages fret not over a day_.