marking of books, periodicals and newspapers by readers, especially in
periodical rooms. Readers with strong feelings cannot resist annotating
articles or chapters that express opinions in which they cannot concur.
Pictures of generals or royalties are especially liable to defacement with
opprobrious epithets. This feeling extends even to bulletins. Libraries
receive strenuous protests against the display of portraits and other
material relating to one of the contesting parties without similar
material on the other side to offset it.
"Efforts to be strictly neutral have not always met with success, some
readers apparently regarding neutrality as synonymous with suppression of
everything favorable to the opposite side. One library reports that the
display of an English military portrait called forth an energetic protest
because it was not balanced by a German one."
Such manifestations as these are merely symptoms. The impulse of the war
toward community education is a tremendous one and it is not strange that
it should find an outlet in all sorts of odd ways. The German sympathizer
who would not ordinarily think of objecting to the display of an English
portrait, and in fact would probably not think of examining it closely
enough to know whether it was English or Austrian, has now become alert.
His alertness makes him open to educative influences, but it may also show
itself in such ways as that just noted.
Keeping the war out of the schools is of course a purely local phenomenon,
to be deprecated where it occurs. The library can do its part here also.
"G. Stanley Hall believes that the problem of teaching the war is how to
utilize in the very best way the wonderful opportunity to open, see and
feel the innumerable and vital lessons involved." Commenting on this a
children's librarian says: "The unparalleled opportunity offered to our
country, and the new complex problems presented by these new conditions
should make the children's librarian pause and take heed.
"Can we do our part toward using the boy's loyalty to his gang or his
nine, his love of his country, his respect for our flag, his devotion to
our heroes, in developing a sense of human brotherhood which alone can
prevent or delay in the next generation another such catastrophe as the
one we face to-day?"
Exclusion of the war from the schools is partly the outcome of the general
attitude of most of our schoolmen, who object to the teaching of a subject
as an incidental. Arithmetic must be studied for itself alone. To absorb
it as a by-product of shop-work, as is done in Gary, is inadmissible. But
it is also a result of the fear that teaching the war at all would
necessarily mean a partisan teaching of it--a conclusion which perhaps we
cannot condemn when we remember the partisan instruction in various other
subjects for which our schools are responsible.
Again, this exclusion is doubtless aided by the efforts of some pacifists,
who believe that, ostrich-like, we should hide our heads in the sand, to
avoid acknowledging the existence of something we do not like. "Why war?"
asks a recent pamphlet. Why, indeed? But we may ask in turn "Why fire?"
"Why flood?" I cannot answer these questions, but it would be foolish to
act as if the scourges did not exist. Nay, I hasten to insure myself
against them, though the possibility that they will injure me is remote.
This ultra-pacifist attitude has gone further than school education and is
trying to put the lid on community education also. Objection, for
instance, has been made to an exhibit of books, prints and posters about
the war, which was displayed in the St. Louis Public Library for nearly
two months. We intended to let it stand for about a week, but the public
would not allow this. The community insists on self-education even against
the will of its natural allies. The contention that we are cultivating the
innate blood-thirstiness of our public, I regard as absurd.
What can we do toward generating or taking advantage of other great
driving impulses toward community education? Must we wait for the horrors
of a great war to teach us geography, industrial chemistry and
international law? Is it necessary to burn down a house every time we want
to roast a pig? Certainly not. But just as one would not think of bringing
on any kind of a catastrophe in order to utilize its shock for educational
purposes, so also I doubt very much whether we need concern ourselves
about the initiation of any impulse toward popular education. These
impulses exist everywhere in great number and variety and we need only to
select the right one and reinforce it. Attempts to generate others are
rarely effective. When we hear the rich mellow tone of a great organ pipe,
it is difficult to realize that all the pipe does is to reinforce a
selected tone among thousands of indistinguishable noises made by the air
rushing through a slit and striking against an edge. Yet this is the fact.
These incipient impulses permeate the community all about us; all we have
to do is to select one, feed it and give it play and we shall have an
"educational movement." This fact is strongly impressed upon anyone
working with clubs. If it is desired to foster some movement by means of
an organization, it is rarely necessary to form one for the purpose. Every
community teems with clubs, associations and circles. All that is needed
is to capture the right one and back it up. Politicians well understand
this art of capture and use it often for evil purposes. In the librarian's
hands it becomes an instrument for good. Better than to offer a course of
twenty lectures under the auspices of the library is it to capture a club,
give it house-room, and help it with its program. I am proud of the fact
that in fifteen public rooms in our library, about four thousand meetings
are held in the course of the year; but I am inclined to be still prouder
of the fact that not one of these is held formally under the auspices of
the library or is visibly patronized by it. To go back to our thesis, all
education is self-education; we can only select, guide and strengthen, but
when we have done these things adequately, we have done a very great work
indeed.
What is true of assemblies and clubs is also true of the selection and use
of books. A book purchased in response to a demand is worth a dozen bought
because the librarian thinks the library ought to have them. The
possibilities of free suggestion by the community are, it seems to me, far
from realized, yet even as it is, I believe that librarians have an
unexampled opportunity of feeling out promising tendencies in this great
flutter of educational impulses all about us, and so of selecting the
right ones and helping them on.
Almost while I have been writing this I have been visited by a delegate
from the foundrymen's club--an organization that wants more books on
foundry practice and wants them placed together in a convenient spot. Such
a visit is of course a heaven-sent opportunity and I suppose I betrayed
something of my pleasure in my manner. My visitor said, "I am so glad you
feel this way about it; we have been meaning for some time to call on you,
but we were in doubt about how we should be received." Such moments are
humiliating to the librarian. Great heavens! Have we advertised,
discussed, talked and plastered our towns with publicity, only to learn at
last that the spokesman of a body of respectable men, asking legitimate
service, rather expects to be kicked downstairs than otherwise when he
approaches us? Is our publicity failing in quantity or in quality?
Whatever may be the matter, it is in response to demands like this that
the library must play its part in community education. Here as elsewhere
it is the foundrymen who are the important factors--their attitude, their
desires, their capabilities. Our function is that of the organ pipe--to
pick out the impulse, respond to it and give it volume and carrying power.
The community will educate itself whether we help or not. It is permeated
by lines of intelligence as the magnetic field is by lines of force.
Thrust in a bit of soft iron and the force-lines will change their
direction in order to pass through the iron. Thrust a book into the
community field, and its lines of intelligence will change direction in
order to take in the contents of the book. If we could map out the field
we should see great masses of lines sweeping through our public libraries.
All about us we see men who tell us that they despair of democracy; that
at any rate, whatever its advantages, democracy can never be "efficient."
Efficient for what? Efficiency is a relative quality, not absolute. A big
German howitzer would be about as inefficient a tool as could be imagined,
for serving an apple-pie. Beside, democracy is a goal; we have not reached
it yet; we shall never reach it if we decide that it is undesirable. The
path toward it is the path of Nature, which leads through conflicts,
survivals, and modifications. Part of it is the path of community
education, which I believe to be efficient in that it is leading on toward
a definite goal. Part of Nature is man, with his desires, hopes and
abilities. Some men, and many women, are librarians, in whom these desires
and hopes have definite aims and in whom the corresponding abilities are
more or less developed. We are all thus cogs in Nature's great scheme for
community education; let us be intelligent cogs, and help the movement on
instead of hindering it.
CLUBWOMEN'S READING
I--_The Malady_
A well-dressed woman entered the Art Department of a large public library.
"Have you any material on the Medici?" she asked the custodian. "Yes; just
what kind of material do you want?" "Stop a minute," cried the woman,
extending a detaining hand; "before you get me anything, just tell me what
they are!" Librarians are trained not to laugh. No one could have detected
the ghost of a smile on this one's face as she lifted the "M" volume of a
cyclopedia from a shelf and placed it on the table before the seeker after
knowledge. "There; that will tell you," she said, and returned to her
work.
Not long afterward she was summoned by a beckoning finger. "I can't tell
from this book," said the perplexed student, "whether the Medici were a
family or a race of people." The Art Librarian tried to untie this knot,
but it was not long before another presented itself. "This book doesn't
explain," said the troubled investigator, "whether the Medici were
Florentines or Italians." Still without a quiver, the art assistant
emitted the required drop of information. "Shan't I get you something more
now?" she asked. "Oh, no; this will be quite sufficient," and taking out
pencil and paper the inquirer began to write rapidly with the cyclopedia
propped before her. Presently, when the Art Librarian looked up, her guest
had disappeared. But she was on hand the next morning. "May I see that
book again?" she asked sweetly. "There are some words here in my copy that
I can't quite make out."
On another occasion a reader, of the same sex, wandered into the
reading-room and began to gaze about her with that peculiar sort of
perplexed aimlessness that librarians have come to recognise instinctively
as an index to the wearer's state of mind. "Have you anything on American
travels?" she asked.
"Do you mean travels in America, or travels by Americans in foreign
countries?"
"Well; I don't know--exactly."
"Do you want books like Dickens's _American Notes_, that give a
foreigner's impression of this country?"
"Ye-es--possibly."
"Or books like Hawthorne's _Note Book_, telling how a foreign country
appears to an American?"
"We-ell; perhaps."
"Are you following a programme of reading?"
"Yes."
"May I see it? That may give me a clue."
"I haven't a copy here."
"Can you give me the name of the person or committee who made it?"
"Oh, I _made_ it _myself_."
This was a "facer"; the librarian seemed to have brought up against a
stone wall, but she waited, knowing that a situation, unlike a knot, will
sometimes untie itself.
The seeker after knowledge also waited for a time. Then she broke out
animatedly:
"Why, I just wanted American travels, don't you know? Funny little stories
and things about the sort of Americans that go abroad with a bird-cage!"
Just what books were given to her I do not know; but in due time her
interesting paper before the Olla Podrida Club was properly noticed in the
local papers.
In another case a perplexed club-woman came to a library for aid in making
a programme of reading. "Have you some ideas about the subject you want to
take up?" asked the reference assistant.
"Well, we had thought of England, or perhaps Scotland; and some of us
would like the Elizabethan Period."
The assistant, after some faithful work, produced a list of books and
articles on each of these somewhat comprehensive subjects and sent them to
the reader for selection. "Which did you finally take?" she asked when the
inquirer next visited the library.
"Oh, they were so good, we decided to use all of them this year!"
The writer is no pessimist. These stories which are as true, word for
word, as any tales not taken down by a stenographer (and far more so than
some that are) seemed to throw the persons who told them into a sort of
dumb despair, but I hastened to reassure them. I pointed out that the
inquirers after knowledge had, beyond all doubt, obtained some modicum of
what they wanted. If the lady in the first tale, for instance, had
mistakenly supposed that the Medici were a new kind of dance or something
to eat, she surely has been disabused. And her cyclopedia article was
probably as well written as most of its kind, so that a literal transcript
of it could have done no harm either to the copyist or to her clubmates.
And the paper on "American Travels," and the combined lists on England,
Scotland and the Elizabethan Period; did not those who laboured on them,
or with them, acquire information in the process? Most assuredly!
Still, I must confess that, in advancing these arguments, I feel somewhat
like an _advocatus diaboli_. It is all very well to treat the puzzled
clubwoman as a joke. When a man slips on a banana-peel and goes down, we
may laugh at his plight; but suppose the whole crowd of passers-by began
to pitch and slide and tumble! Should we not think that some horrible
epidemic had laid its hand on us? The ladies with their Medici and their
Travels are not isolated instances. Ask the librarians; they know, but in
countless instances they do not tell, for fear of casting ridicule upon
the hundreds of intelligent clubwomen whom they are proud to help. In many
libraries there is a standing rule against repeating or discussing the
errors and slips of the public, especially to the ever hungry reporter. I
break this rule here with equanimity, and even with a certain degree of
hope, for my object is to awaken my readers to the knowledge that part of
the reading public is suffering from a malady of some kind. Later I may
try my hand at diagnosis and even at therapeutics. And I am taking as an
illustration chiefly the reading done by women's clubs, not because men do
not do reading of the same kind, or because it is not done by individuals
as well as by groups; but because, just at the present time, women in
general, and clubwomen in particular, seem especially likely to be
attacked by the disease. It must be remembered also that I am writing from
the standpoint of the public library, and I here make humble
acknowledgement of the fact that many things in the educational field,
both good and bad, go on quite outside of that institution and beyond its
ken.
The intellectual bonds between the library and the woman's club have
always been close. Many libraries are the children of such clubs; many
clubs have been formed in and by libraries. If any mistakes are being made
in the general policies and programmes of club reading, the librarian
would naturally be the first to know it, and he ought to speak out. He
does know it, and his knowledge should become public property at once.
But, I repeat, although the trouble is conspicuous in connection with the
reading of women's clubs, it is far more general and deeply rooted than
this.
The malady's chief symptom, which is well known to all librarians, is a
lack of correspondence between certain readers and the books that they
choose. Reading, like conversation, is the meeting of two minds. If there
is no contact, the process fails. If the cogs on the gearwheels do not
interact, the machine can not work. If the reader of a book on algebra
does not understand arithmetic; if he tackles a philosophical essay on the
representative function without knowing what the phrase means; if he tries
to read a French book without knowing the language, his mind is not fitted
for contact with that of the writer, and the mental machinery will not
move.
In the early days of the Open Shelf, before librarians had realised the
necessity of copious assignments to "floor duty," and before there were
children's librarians, I saw in a branch library a small child staggering
under the weight of a volume of Schaff's _History of the Christian
Church_, which he had taken from the shelves and was presenting at the
desk to be charged. "You are not going to read that, are you?" said the
desk assistant.
"It isn't for me; it's for me big brudder."
"What did your big brother ask you to get?"
"Oh, a Physiology!"
Nowadays, our well-organised children's rooms make such an occurrence
doubtful with the little ones, but apparently there is much of it with
adults.
Too much of our reading--I should rather say our attempts at reading--is
of this character. Such attempts are the result of a tendency to regard
the printed page as a fetich--to think that if one knows his alphabet and
can call the printed words one after another as his eye runs along the
line, some unexplained good will result, or at least that he has performed
a praiseworthy act, has "accumulated merit" somehow or somewhere, like a
Thibetan with his prayer-wheel.
It is probably a fact that if a man should meet you in the street and say,
"In beatific repentance lies jejune responsibility," you would stare at
him and pass him by, or perhaps flee from him as from a lunatic; whereas
if you saw these words printed in a book you might gravely study them to
ascertain their meaning, or still worse, might succeed in reading your own
meaning into them. The words I have strung together happen to have no
meaning, but the result would be the same if they meant something that was
hidden from the reader by his inability to understand them, no matter what
the cause of that inability might be.
This malady is doubtless spontaneous in some degree, and dependent on
failings of the human mind that we need not discuss here, but there are
signs that it is being fostered, spread, and made more acute by special
influences. Probably our educational methods are not altogether blameless.
The boy who trustfully approached a Reference Librarian and said, "I have
to write a composition on what I saw between home and school; have you got
a book about that?" had doubtless been taught that he must look in a book
for everything. The conscientious teacher who was now trying to separate
him from his notion may have been the very one who, perhaps unconsciously,
had instilled it; if so, her fault had thus returned to plague her.
The boy or girl who comes to attach a sacredness or a wizardry to the book
in itself will naturally believe, after a little, that whether he
understands what is in it matters little--and this is the malady of which
we have been complaining.
A college teacher of the differential calculus, in a time now happily long
past, when a pupil timidly inquired the reason for this or that, was wont
to fix the interrogator with his eye and say, "Sir; it is so because the
book says so!" Even in more recent days a well-known university teacher,
accustomed to use his own text-book, used to say when a student had
ventured to vary its classic phraseology, "It can not be expressed better
than in the words of the book!?" These instances, of course, are taken
from the dark ages of education, but even to-day I believe that a false
idea of the value of a printed page merely as print--not as the record of
a mind, ready to make contact with the mind of a reader--has impressed
itself too deeply on the brains of many children at an age when such
impressions are apt to be durable. Not that the schools are especially at
fault; we have all played our part in this unfortunate business. It might
all fade, at length; we all know that many good teachings of our childhood
do vanish; why should not the bad ones occasionally follow suit?
But now come in all the well-meaning instructors of the adult--the
Chautauquans, the educational extensionists, the lecturers, the
correspondence schools, the advisers of reading, the makers of booklists,
the devisers of "courses." They deepen the fleeting impression and
increase its capacity for harm, while varying slightly the mechanism that
produced it. As the child grows into a man, his childish idea that a book
will produce a certain effect independently of what it contains is apt to
yield a little to reason. The new influences, some of which I have named
above, do not attempt directly to combat this dawning intelligence; they
utilise it to complete the mental discomfiture of their victims. They
admit the necessity of comprehending the contents of the book, but they
persuade the reader that such comprehension is easier than it really is.
And they often administer specially concocted tabloids that convince one
that he knows more than he really does. Thus the unsuspecting adult goes
on reading what he does not understand, not now thinking that it does not
matter, but falsely persuaded that he has become competent to understand.
Every one of the agencies that I have named aims to do good educational
work; every one is competent to do such work; nearly every one does much
of it. I am finding fault with them only so far as they succeed in
persuading readers that they are better educated than they really are. In
this respect such agencies are precisely on a par with the proprietary
medicine that is an excellent laxative or sudorific, but is offered also
as a cure for tuberculosis or cancer.
I once heard the honoured head of a famous body that does an enormous
amount of work of this sort deliver an _apologia_, deserving of all
attention, in which he complained that his institution had been falsely
accused of superficiality. It was, he said, perfectly honest in what it
taught. If its pupils thought that the elementary knowledge they were
gaining was comprehensive and thorough, that was their fault--not his. And
vet, at that moment, the institution was posing before its pupils as a
"university" and using the forms and nomenclature of such a body to
strengthen the idea in their minds. We cannot acquit it, or any of the
agencies like it, of complicity in the causation of the malady whose
symptoms we are discussing.
It is not the fault of the women's clubs that they have fallen into line
in such an imposing procession as this. Their formation and work
constitute one of the most interesting and important manifestations of the
present feminist movement. Their rôle in it is partly social, partly
educational; and as they consist of adults, elementary education is of
course excluded from their programme. We therefore find them committed,
perhaps unconsciously, to the plan of required or recommended reading, in
a form that has long been the bane of our educational systems both in
school and out.
One of the corner-stones of this system is the idea that the acquisition
of information is valuable in itself, no matter what may be the
relationship between it and the acquiring mind, or what use of it may be
made in the future. According to this idea, if a woman can once get into
her head that the Medici were a family and not "a race of people," it
matters little that she is unfitted to comprehend why they are worth
reading about at all, or that the fact has nothing to do with what she has
ever done or is likely to be called upon to do in the future.