interested--the book store. Once every town had its book-store. Now they
are rare. We have few such stores even in a city of the size of St. Louis.
Every department store has its book-section. They are rarely satisfactory.
Everybody is lamenting the disappearance of the old book-store, with its
old scholarly proprietor who knew books and the book-market; who loved
books and the book-business. Quarts of ink have been wasted in trying to
account for his disappearance. The Public Library, for one thing, has been
blamed for it. I have no time now to disprove this, though it is very
clear to me that libraries help the book trade instead of hindering it. I
shall simply give you my version of the trouble. The book-dealer
disappeared, as soon as he entered into competition with the department
store. He put in side lines of toys, and art supplies, and cameras and
candy. He began to spread himself thin and had no time for expert
concentration on his one specialty. Thus he lost his one advantage over
the department store--his strength in the region where it was weak; and of
course he succumbed. If you will think for a moment of the special
businesses that have survived the competition of the department store, you
will see that they are precisely the ones that have resisted this
temptation to spread themselves and have been content to remain experts.
Look at the men's furnishing stores. Would they have survived if they had
begun to sell cigars and lawn-mowers? Look at the retail shoe stores, the
opticians, the cigar stores, the bakers, the meat markets, the
confectioners, the restaurants of all grades! They have all to compete
with the department stores, but their customers realize that they have
something to offer that can be offered by no department store--expert
service in one line, due to some one's life-long training, experience and
devotion to the public.
I do not want the pharmacist to go the way of the book dealers. Already
some of the department stores include drug departments. I do not see how
these can be as good as independent pharmacies. But I do not see the
essential difference between a drug department in a store that sells also
cigars and stationery and confectionery, and a so-called independent
pharmacy that also distributes these very things.
I am assuming that the druggist is an expert. That is the object of our
colleges of pharmacy, as I understand the matter. As a librarian I want to
deal with a book man who knows more of the book business than I do. I want
to ask his advice and be able to rely on it. When I have printing to be
done, I like to give it to a man who knows more about the printed page
than I do. When I buy bread, or shoes, or a house, or a farm I like to
deal with recognized experts in these articles. How much more when I am
purchasing substances where expert knowledge will turn the balance between
life and death. I have gossiped with pharmacists enough to know that all
physicians do not avoid incompatibles in their prescriptions, and that
occasionally a combination falls into the prescription clerk's hands,
which, if made up as he reads it would produce a poisonous compound, or
perhaps even an explosive mixture. Two heads are better than one, and if
my physician ever makes a mistake of this kind I look to my pharmacist to
see that it shall not reach the practical stage.
I recognize the great value and service of the department store, but I do
not go there for my law or medicine; neither do I care to resort thither
for my pharmacy. I want our separate drug stores to persist, and I want
them to remain in charge of experts.
And when the store deals in other things than purely therapeutic
preparations--which I have already said I think probably unavoidable,--I
want it to present the aspect of a pharmacy that deals also in toilet
preparations and mineral water, not of an establishment for dispensing
soda-water and soap, where one may have a prescription filled on the side,
in an emergency. And when the emergency does arise, I should have the
pharmacy respond to it. It is the place where we naturally look in an
emergency--the spot to which the victim of an accident is carried
directly--the one where the lady bends her steps when she feels that she
is going to faint. In hundreds of cases the drug store is our only
standby, and it should be the druggist's business to see that it never
fails us. There are pharmacies where a telephone message brings an
unfailing response; there are others to which one would as soon think of
sending an inquiry regarding a Biblical quotation. To which type, do you
think, will the public prefer to resort?
Then there are those little courtesies that no retail business is obliged
to offer, but that the public has been accustomed to expect from the
druggist--the cashing of checks, the changing of bills, the furnishing of
postage stamps, the consultation of the city directory. There can be no
reason for resorting to a drug store for all these favors except that the
pharmacist has an enviable reputation as the man who is most likely to
grant them. And yet I begin to hear druggists complaining of the results
of this reputation, of which they ought to be proud; I see them pointing
out that there is no profit on postage stamps and no commission for
changing a bill. They intimate, further, that although it may be proper
for them to put themselves out for regular customers, it is absurd for
strangers to ask for these courtesies. I marvel when I hear these
sentiments. If this popular impression regarding the courtesy of the
druggist did not exist, it would be worth the expenditure of vast sums and
the labor of a lifetime to create it. To deliberately undo it would be as
foolish as to lock the door in the face of customers.
I do not believe that in St. Louis the pharmaceutical profession is
generally averse to a reputation for generous public service, and I base
my belief on some degree of personal knowledge. The St. Louis Public
Library operates about sixty delivery stations in various parts of the
city. These stations are all in drug stores. The work connected with them,
though light, is by no means inconsiderable, and yet not one of the
druggists who undertake it charges the library a cent for his space or his
services. Doubtless they expect a return from the increased attractiveness
of their places to the public. I hope that they get it and I believe that
they do. At any rate we have evidence here of the pharmacist's belief that
the bread of public service, cast upon the waters, will sooner or later
return.
You will notice that I am saying nothing about advertising. One would
think from the pharmaceutical papers, with which I am not unfamiliar, that
the druggist's chief end was to have a sensational show window of some
kind. These things are not unimportant, but I do not dwell on them because
I believe that if a druggist realizes the importance of his profession; if
he makes himself a recognized expert in it; if he sticks to it and
magnifies it; if he makes his place indispensable to the community around
him, the first point to which the citizens resort for help in an
emergency, an unfailing center of courtesy and favor--he may fill his
window with toilet soap, or monkeys, or with nothing at all--there will
still be a trodden path up to his door.
Gentlemen, you have chosen as your life work a profession that I believe
to be indispensable to human welfare--one of enviable tradition and honor
and with standing and reputation in the community that set it apart, in
some degree from all others. And while I would not have you neglect the
material success that it may bring you, I would urge you to expect this as
a result rather than strive for it as an immediate end. I would have you
labor to maintain and develop the special knowledge that you have gained
in this institution, to hold up the standard of courtesy and helpfulness
under which you can best do public service, confident that if you do these
things, business standing and financial success will also be added unto
you.
HOW THE COMMUNITY EDUCATES ITSELF[15]
[15] Read before the American Library Association, Asbury Park,
N.J., June 27, 1916.
In endeavoring to distinguish between self-education and education by
others, one meets with considerable difficulty. If a boy reads Mill's
"Political Economy'" he is surely educating himself; but if after reading
each chapter he visits a class and answers certain questions propounded
for the purpose of ascertaining whether he has read it at all, or has read
it understandingly, then we are accustomed to transfer the credit for the
educative process to the questioner, and say that the boy has been
educated at school or college. As a matter of fact, I think most of us are
self-educated. Not only is most of what an adult knows and can do,
acquired outside of school, but in most of what he learned even there he
was self-taught. His so-called teachers assigned tasks to him and saw that
he performed them. If he did not, they subjected him to discipline. Once
or twice in a lifetime most of us have run up against a real teacher--a
man or a woman that really played a major part in shaping our minds as
they now are--our stock of knowledge, our ways of thought, our methods of
doing things. These men have stood and are still standing (though they may
have joined the great majority long ago) athwart the stream of sensation
as it passes through us, and are determining what part shall be stored up,
and where; what kind of action shall ultimately result from it. The
influence of a good teacher spreads farther and lasts longer than that of
any other man. If his words have been recorded in books it may reach
across the seas and down the ages.
There is another reason why the distinction between school education and
self-education breaks down. If the boy with whom we began had any teacher
at all it was John Stuart Mill, and this man was his teacher whether or
not his reading of the book was prescribed and tested in a class-room. I
would not have you think that I would abolish schools and colleges. I wish
we had more of the right kind, but the chief factor in educative
acquirement will still be the pupil.
So when the community educates itself, as it doubtless does and as it must
do, it simply continues a process with which it has always been familiar,
but without control, or under its own control. Of all the things that we
learn, control is the most vital. What we are is the sum of those things
that we do not repress. We begin without self-repression and have to be
controlled by others. When we learn to exercise control ourselves, it is
right that even our education should revert wholly to what it has long
been in greater part--a voluntary process.
This does not mean that at this time the pupil abandons guidance. It means
that he is free to choose his own guides and the place and method of using
them. Some rely wholly on experience; others are wise enough to see that
life is too short and too narrow to acquire all that we need, and they set
about to make use also of that acquired by others. Some of these wiser
ones use only their companions and acquaintances; others read books. The
wisest are opportunists; they make use of all these methods as they have
occasion. Their reading does not make them avoid the exchange of ideas by
conversation, nor does the acquirement of ideas in either way preclude
learning daily by experience, or make reflection useless or unnecessary.
He who lives a full life acquires ideas as he may, causes them to combine,
change and generate in his own mind, and then translates them into action
of some kind. He who omits any of these things cannot be said to have
really lived. He cannot, it is true, fail to acquire ideas unless he is an
idiot; but he may fail to acquire them broadly, and may even make the
mistake of thinking that he can create them in his own mind.
He may, however, acquire fully and then merely store without change or
combination; that is, he may turn his brain into a warehouse instead of
using it as a factory.
And the man who has acquired broadly and worked over his raw material into
a product of his own, may still stop there and never do anything. Our
whole organism is subsidiary to action and he who stops short of it has
surely failed to live.
Our educative processes, so far, have dwelt heavily on acquirement,
somewhat lightly on mental assimilation and digestion, and have left
action almost untouched. In these two latter respects, especially, is the
community self-educated.
The fact that I am saying this here, and to you, is a sufficient guaranty
that I am to lay some emphasis on the part played by books in these
self-educative processes. A book is at once a carrier and a tool; it
transports the idea and plants it. It is a carrier both in time and in
space--the idea that it implants may be a foreign idea, or an ancient
idea, or both. Either of its functions may for the moment be paramount; a
book may bring to you ideas whose implantation your brain resists, or it
may be used to implant ideas that are already present, as when an
instructor uses his own text book. Neither of these two cases represents
education in the fullest sense.
You will notice that I have not yet defined education. I do not intend to
try, for my time is limited. But in the course of my own educative
processes, which I trust are still proceeding, the tendency grows stronger
and stronger to insist on an intimate connection with reality in all
education--to making it a realization that we are to do something and a
yearning to be able to do it. The man who has never run up against things
as they are, who has lived in a world of moonshine, who sees crooked and
attempts what is impossible and what is useless--is he educated? I used to
wonder what a realist was. Now that I am becoming one myself I begin dimly
to understand. He certainly is not a man devoid of ideals, but they are
real ideals, if you will pardon the bull.
I believe that I am in goodly company. The library as I see it has also
set its face toward the real. What else is meant by our business branches,
our technology rooms, our legislative and municipal reference departments?
They mean that slow as we may be to respond to community thought and to do
our part in carrying on community education, we are vastly more sensitive
than the school, which still turns up its nose at efforts like the Gary
system; than the stage, which still teaches its actors to be stagy instead
of natural; even than the producers of the very literature that we help to
circulate, who rarely know how even to represent the conversation of two
human beings as it really is. And when a great new vehicle of popular
artistic expression arises, like the moving picture, those who purvey it
spend their millions to build mock cities instead of to reproduce the
reality that it is their special privilege to be able to show. And they
hire stage actors to show off their staginess on the screen--staginess
that is a thousand times more stagy because its background is of waving
foliage and glimmering water, instead of the painted canvas in front of
which it belongs. The heart of the community is right. Its heroine is Mary
Pickford. It rises to realism as one man. The little dog who cannot pose,
and who pants and wags his tail on the screen as he would anywhere else,
elicits thunderous applause. The baby who puckers up its face and cries,
oblivious of its environment, is always a favorite. But the trend of all
this, these institutions cannot see. We librarians are seeing it a little
more clearly. We may see it--we shall see it, more clearly still.
The self-education of a community often depends very closely on bonds of
connection already established between the minds of that community's
individual members. Sometimes it depends on a sudden connection made
through the agency of a single event of overwhelming importance and
interest. Let me illustrate what I mean by connection of this kind. For
many years it was my duty to cross the Hudson river twice daily on a
crowded ferry-boat, and it used to interest me to watch the behavior of
the crowds under the influence of simple impulses affecting them all
alike. I am happy to say that I never had an opportunity of observing the
effect of complex impulses such as those of panic terror. I used
particularly to watch, from the vantage point of a stairway whence I could
look over their heads, the behavior of the crowd standing in the cabin
just before the boat made its landing. Each person in the crowd stood
still quietly, and the tendency was toward a loose formation to ensure
comfort and some freedom of movement. At the same time each was ready and
anxious to move forward as soon as the landing should be made. Only those
in front could see the bow of the ferryboat; the others could see nothing
but the persons directly in front of them. When those in the front rank
saw that the landing was very near they began to move forward; those just
behind followed suit and so on to the rear. The result was that I saw a
wave of compression, of the same sort as a sound-wave in air, move through
the throng. The individual motions were forward but the wave moved
backward. No better example of a wave of this kind could be devised. Now
the actions and reactions between the air-particles in a sound wave are
purely mechanical. Not so here. There was neither pushing nor pulling of
the ordinary kind. Each person moved forward because his mind was fixed on
moving forward at the earliest opportunity, and because the forward
movement of those just in front showed him that now was the time and the
opportunity. The physical link, if there was one, properly speaking,
between one movement and another was something like this: A wave of light,
reflected from the body of the man in front, entered the eye of the man
just behind, where it was transformed into a nerve impulse that readied
the brain through the optic nerve. Here it underwent complicated
transformations and reactions whose nature we can but surmise, until it
left the brain as a motor impulse and caused the leg muscles to contract,
moving their owner forward. All this may or may not have taken place
within the sphere of consciousness; in the most cases it had happened so
often that it had been relegated to that of unconscious cerebration.
I have entered into so much detail because I want to make it clear that a
connection may be established between members of a group, even so casual a
group as that of persons who happen to cross on the same ferry boat, that
is so real and compelling, that its results simulate those of physical
forces. In thin case the results were dependent on the existence in the
crowd of one common bond of interest. They all wanted to leave the ferry
boat as soon as possible, and by its bow. If some of them had wanted to
stay on the boat and go back with it, or if it had been a river steamboat
where landings were made from several gangways in different parts of the
boat the simple wave of compression that I saw would not have been set up.
In like manner the ordinary influences that act on men's minds tend in all
sorts of directions and their results are not easily traced. Occasionally,
however, there occurs some event so great that it turns us all in the same
direction and establishes a common network of psychical connections. Such
an event fosters community education.
We have lately witnessed such a phenomenon in the sudden outbreak of the
great European War. Probably no person in the community as we librarians
know it remained unaffected by this event. In most it aroused some kind of
a desire to know what was going on. It was necessary that most of us
should know a little more than we did of the differences in racial
temperament and aim among the inhabitants of the warring nations, of such
movements as Pan-Slavism and Pan-Germanism, of the recent political
history of Europe, of modern military tactics and strategy, of
international law, of geography, of the pronunciation of foreign
placenames, of the chemistry of explosives--of a thousand things regarding
which we had hitherto lacked the impulse to inform ourselves. This sort of
thing is going on in a community every day, but here was a catastrophe
setting in motion a mighty brain-wave that had twisted us all in one
direction. Notice now what a conspicuous role our public libraries play in
phenomena of this kind. In the first place, the newspaper and periodical
press reflects at once the interest that has been aroused. Where man's
unaided curiosity would suggest one question it adds a hundred others.
Problems that would otherwise seem simple enough now appear complex--the
whole mental interest is intensified. At the same time there is an attempt
to satisfy the questions thus raised. The man who did not know about the
Belgian treaty, or the possible use of submarines as commerce-destroyers,
has all the issues put before him with at least an attempt to settle them.
This service of the press to community education would be attempted, but
it would not be successfully rendered, without the aid of the public
library, for it has come to pass that the library is now almost the only
non-partisan institution that we possess; and community education, to be
effective, must be non-partisan. The press is almost necessarily biassed.
The man who is prejudiced prefers the paper or the magazine that will
cater to his prejudices, inflame them, cause him to think that they are
reasoned results instead of prejudices. If he keeps away from the public
library he may succeed in blinding himself; if he uses it he can hardly do
so. He will find there not only his own side but all the others; if he has
the ordinary curiosity that is our mortal heritage he cannot help glancing
at the opinions of others occasionally. No man is really educated who does
not at least know that another side exists to the question on which he has
already made up his mind--or had it made up for him.
Further, no one is content to stop with the ordinary periodical
literature. The flood of books inspired by this war is one of the most
astonishing things about it. Most libraries are struggling to keep up with
it in some degree. Very few of these books would be within the reach of
most of us were it not for the library.
I beg you to notice the difference in the reaction of the library to this
war and that of the public school as indicative of the difference between
formal educative processes, as we carry them on, and the self-education of
the community. I have emphasized the freedom of the library from bias. The
school is necessarily biassed--perhaps properly so. You remember the story
of the candidate for a district school who, when asked by an examining
committee-man whether the earth was round or flat, replied, "Well, some
says one and some t'other. I teach either round or flat, as the parents
wish."
Now, there are books that maintain the flatness of the earth, and they
properly find a place on the shelves of large public libraries. Those who
wish to compare the arguments pro and con are at liberty to do so. Even in
such a _res adjudicata_ as this the library takes no sides. But in spite
of the obliging school candidate, the school cannot proceed in this way.
The teaching of the child must be definite. And there are other subjects,
historical ones for instance, in which the school's attitude may be
determined by its location, its environment, its management. When it is a
public school and its controlling authority is really trying to give
impartial instruction there are some subjects that must simply be skipped,
leaving them to be covered by post-scholastic community education. This is
the school's limitation. Only the policy of caution is very apt to be
carried too far. Thus we find that in the school the immense educational
drive of the European War has not been utilized as it has in the community
at large. In some places the school authorities have erected a barrier
against it. So far as they are concerned the war has been non-existent.
This difference between the library and the school appears in such reports
as the following from a branch librarian:
"Throughout the autumn and most of the winter we found it absolutely
impossible to supply the demand for books about the war. Everything we had
on the subject or akin to it--books, magazines, pamphlets--were in
constant use. Books of travel and history about the warring countries
became popular--things that for years had been used but rarely became
suddenly vitally interesting.
"I have been greatly interested by the fact that the high school boys and
girls never ask for anything about the war. Not once during the winter
have I seen in one of them a spark of interest in the subject. It seems so
strange that it should be necessary to keep them officially ignorant of
this great war because the grandfather of one spoke French and of another
German."
Another librarian says:
"The war again has naturally stimulated an interest in maps. With every
turn in military affairs, new ones are issued and added to our collection.
These maps, as received, have been exhibited for short periods upon
screens and they have never lacked an appreciative line of spectators,
representing all nationalities."