Hints on the Formation of School Libraries.
What sort of reading are our schools planting an appetite
for? Are they really doing anything to instruct and form
the mental taste, so that the pupils on leaving them may
be safely left to choose their reading for themselves? It
is clear in evidence that they are far from educating the
young to take pleasure in what is intellectually noble and
sweet. The statistics of our public libraries show that some
cause is working mightily to prepare them only for delight
in what is both morally and intellectually mean and foul. It
would not indeed be fair to charge our public schools with
positively giving this preparation; but it is their business
to forestall and prevent such a result. If, along with the
faculty of reading, they cannot also impart some safeguards of
taste and habit against such a result, will the system prove a
success?—HENRY N. HUDSON.
Much is being said, now-a-days, about the utility of school libraries;
and in some instances much ill-directed, if not entirely misdirected,
labor is being expended in their formation. Public libraries are not
necessarily public benefits; and school libraries, unless carefully
selected and judiciously managed, will not prove to be unmixed
blessings. There are several questions which teachers and school
officers should seriously consider before setting themselves to the
task of establishing a library; and no teacher who is not himself a
knower of books, and a reader, should presume to regulate and direct
the reading of others.
What are the objects of a school library? They are twofold: First,
to aid in cultivating a taste for good reading; second, to supply
materials for supplementary study and independent research. Now,
neither of these objects can be attained unless your library
is composed of books selected especially with reference to the
capabilities and needs of your pupils. Dealing, as you do, with pupils
of various degrees of intellectual strength, warped by every variety of
moral influence and home training, the cultivation of a taste for good
reading among them is no small matter. To do this, your library must
contain none but truly good books. It is a great mistake to suppose
that every collection of books placed in a schoolhouse is a library;
and yet that is the name which is applied to many very inferior
collections. It is no uncommon thing to find these so-called libraries
composed altogether of the odds and ends of literature,—of donations,
entirely worthless to their donors; of second-hand school-books;
of Patent Office Reports and other public documents; and of the
dilapidated remains of some older and equally worthless collection
of books: and with these you talk about cultivating a taste for good
reading! One really good book, a single copy of “St. Nicholas,” is
worth more than all this trash. Get it out of sight at once! The value
of a library—no matter for what purpose it has been founded—depends
not upon the number of its books, but upon their character. And so the
first rule to be observed in the formation of a school library is, Buy
it at first hand, even though you should begin with a single volume,
and shun all kinds of donations, unless they be donations of cash, or
books of unquestionable value.
In selecting books for purchase, you will have an eye singly to the
wants of the students who are to use them. A school library should
be in no sense a public circulating library. You cannot cater to the
literary tastes of the public, and at the same time serve the best
interests of your pupils. Books relating to history, to biography, and
to travel will form a very large portion of your library. These should
be chosen with reference to the age and mental capacity of those who
are to read them. No book should be bought merely because it is a good
book, but because we know that it can be made useful in the attainment
of certain desired ends. The courses of reading indicated in the
following chapters of this work, it is hoped, will assist you largely
in making a wise selection as well as in directing to a judicious use
of books. For the selection of a book is only half of your duty: the
profitable use of it is the other half; and this lesson should be early
taught to your pupils.
If, through means of your school library or otherwise, you succeed
in enlisting the interest of a young person in profitable methodical
reading, you have accomplished a great deal towards the forwarding of
his education and the formation of his character. It is a great mistake
to suppose that a boy of twelve cannot pursue a course of reading in
English history; if properly directed and encouraged, he will enjoy it
far better than the perusal of the milk-and-water story-books which,
under the guise of “harmless juvenile literature,” have been placed in
his hands by well-meaning teachers or parents.
In a former chapter I have shown you how, with a library of only fifty
volumes, you may have in your possession the very best of all that
the world’s master-minds have ever written,—food, as I have said, for
study, and meditation, and mind growth enough for a lifetime. Such
a library is worth more than ten thousand volumes of the ordinary
“popular” kind of books. So, also, the reading of a very few books,
carefully and methodically, by your pupils—the constant presence of
the very best books in our language, and the exclusion of the trashy
and the vile—will give them more real enjoyment and infinitely greater
profit than the desultory or hasty reading of many volumes. A small
library is to be despised only when it contains inferior books.
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