THE TEACHER’S LIBRARY.
What do you read? A look at your library will reveal much of your
interest and professional zeal. Gypsies examine your hand or feel
of your head to tell your fortune and predict your future. If you
want revealed the future and the fortune of a teacher examine that
teacher’s library and see what books they read and have read. A glance
at the library will tell much of the teacher’s zeal, earnestness, and
enthusiasm in the profession. You can gauge them pretty accurately by
the books they read. One’s library, like one’s dress, oft proclaims
one’s character.
Of course the teacher does not confine herself to professional books
and reading alone. No one would expect such a thing. It would make
you narrow. If this had been your entire line of reading you would be
narrow now. The question is, do you ever read professional books and
professional literature? What faith would you have in a physician who
had never read medical books, and who did not take and read the current
literature of his profession? Would you engage a lawyer to defend your
interests or to look after your business who had never read or heard of
the great treatises on law? Would you entrust the life of your child to
the former? Would you intrust your business to the latter?
Would you then ask parents to entrust the education of their child to
you when you have never read nor heard of the literature that bears
upon teaching and education? If you neither read nor care for the
current literature of teaching, educational journals, and magazine
articles of merit bearing upon your work, do you think that you are
equipped properly for the best interest and education of the child? Can
you blame thinking men and women for criticising and often giving very
little deference to the teacher’s opinion of education? Is the mind so
much less important that good judgment would reject the physician and
the lawyer who have done no professional study, and accept the teacher,
ignorant of the literature of her line of work and who had never given
any study of why or how or what to teach in order to best develop the
child? Is the mind of less importance than the body? Is property dearer
to the parent than the child?
If teaching is a profession, or is ever to become one, teachers must
read the literature of the profession. If you are a professional
teacher, or if you are ever to become one, you must read and enjoy the
reading of good books on teaching and education. It is not the reading
alone but the keen interest and love for the reading. Teaching can
never become a profession until teachers become acquainted with the
literature of the profession, and even before they enter the profession
must show that they have made the acquaintance of this literature.
I have little faith in the teacher who does not care for good books,
and who does not own and read a few good books. The teacher who has
taught for a few terms and who has not at least the beginning of a
professional library ought to quit. It is an imposition upon the
public to continue year after year teaching when you do not have
interest enough in your work nor love enough for the profession to own
a few good books bearing upon your work. It is a sure sign that your
interest in teaching is a mere mercenary interest. You teach for the
dollars only. That is not so bad in itself if you want to give value
received for the dollars. Few of us could or would teach if there
were no salary attached, but there is a deeper and broader interest
that is above money value. This broader interest is lacking when the
teacher does not care to buy and read a few books each year upon her
professional work.
It is not the size of the library that counts. It is the reading and
the study and the assimilation of the contents of the library that
is of value. Your library should not only be well read, but steadily
growing. New books should be added from year to year, educational
journals and magazine articles bearing upon the present trend of
teaching and education should be found. They should be read carefully
and critically. You need not swallow without mastication every
newly-hatched theory or educational cure-all that is advocated. It is
the reading teacher that has ballast and is not swept away with every
new-fangled notion that is sprung upon the public by the educational
demagogue and sensationalist.
Your library need not be large, but it should be well-selected. It
should be bought for use and not for show. There is much difference
between the teacher’s working library and the teacher’s parlor show
library. It takes but a glance to recognize the difference. In the
working library there will be the regular text-books used in the
school course. These are for getting clear, systematic, fresh outlines
of the work from day to day. How often a five-minutes’ glance at the
author’s treatment of a subject at night will clear up two or three
days of work for the class. It lightens your work and it enables you
to organize what you give to the class. There should be a few other
late texts upon the subjects. From these you will get side lights and
little points of information to supplement the regular texts. There
should be a few more advanced texts upon several of the subjects from
which you may occasionally get view points to keep your own knowledge
from fossilizing. Advanced text-books and other good texts besides the
regular ones used by the pupils are the every day tools of the teacher.
A good dictionary is very essential. This dictionary need not be the
largest nor latest complete dictionary. Such a dictionary is proper
equipment for the schools, but the best working dictionary for the
teacher is often an academic or a student’s dictionary. You will refer
to these oftener. I know from experience. On my study desk are three
dictionaries--one is a late edition of one of the very best, the others
are academic dictionaries, late and standard, but books of from five to
eight hundred pages. I use the smaller ten times to the larger once.
When you buy a dictionary get one with the index. If your time is worth
a cent an hour it will soon repay you the extra cost. Then you will use
it oftener because it is more quickly done.
You need a good, authentic, up-to-date encyclopedia. This need not be
the largest, nor an expensive one. A two or a four-volumed encyclopedia
will often be of more use to you than a larger one. You will use
it oftener, just as in the case of the dictionary. In buying an
encyclopedia, do not be gulled by cheap reprints--something that treats
everything else in the world but the things you want, and treats these
at such length that you are lost in a mass of detail before you have
read half a page. The young teacher makes a mistake in buying a fifty
or seventy-five dollar encyclopedia when he has not twenty dollars
worth of other books in his library. Do not be so foolish as to think
an encyclopedia will give you all the knowledge that is ever wanted.
Thinking is what gives you power, not facts. Facts serve a useful
purpose in thinking, but unless they are organized you will get little
out of them. An encyclopedia can give you only general facts. Half a
hundred other books would be far more useful to you than a complete
encyclopedia.
You should have a good, small atlas for ready reference. This should be
fairly authentic and up-to-date at the time you buy it. Look carefully
at reprints and unauthentic compilations. They are many and often
costly. You can get a very reliable small usable atlas for a dollar or
two. The world is changing fast. An atlas soon gets out of date. When
you buy one get one that gives the latest census. The present atlases
giving the census of 1900 will soon be laid on the shelf after the
census of 1910 becomes available.
You should have a few good, authentic histories, histories of our own
country as well as general histories. Here, too, good text-books will
give you a bird’s-eye view and an understanding of things often better
than the larger histories. Get your general outline view first, and
then as time and opportunity offers get the deeper, more critical view
by the study of special events and topics. Teachers are lacking in
their knowledge of history. The teacher should have a well-organized
epitome of the world’s history clearly in mind. He should see the
nations come and go as he looks down the ages, and see the mile post
which each nation marked in the growth of civilization. Then he should
have a broader, closer knowledge of our own country, trying in every
case to see our national development and progress in the light of the
world’s progress rather than the events in themselves.
Do not forget biography. It is rich in interest and inspiration, not
only for the teacher as a person and an individual, but it is even
richer still in food for the teacher as a teacher. The pupil is hard
to find who is not or cannot be interested in biography if the teacher
is full of it. His history is his knowledge of the individual. He is
hungering for this knowledge of the individual if only the teacher
will point the way and show an interest in it. I may be wrong, but I
fear we are going to seed on myths and gods and heroes of the remote
past. Fairy stories and myths have their place. To say the child is
interested in them is not always conclusive argument. If the teacher
would get out and help build it the child would be intensely interested
in making a snow man. The difference between a teacher and an ideal
teacher is often the difference between the teacher that can inspire an
interest in sane, sensible, intelligent lines and the teacher that can
interest along the useless, unimportant lines. At least the teacher’s
library should be rich in biography. No book ever read so thoroughly
interested me when I was a boy as Franklin’s Autobiography, and no book
I ever read had greater influence on my life. To this day I find his
common-sense maxims coming up before me with telling force.
What fiction is more enjoyable than many of the biographies of our
great men? Read Grant’s Memoirs, read Phil Sheridan’s Life, read
the Autobiography of the teacher and diplomat, Andrew D. White. Can
you in fiction find anything more interesting? Then such books as
Blaine’s “Twenty Years in Congress,” Benton’s “Thirty Years,” Greeley’s
“American Conflict,” Davis’s “Rise and Fall of the Confederacy,” and
Nicolay and Hay’s “Life of Lincoln”--what teacher can begin one of
them and not become thoroughly absorbed in it, living over again the
scenes they describe. In mentioning the individual books, I do not
mean to imply there are not others just as interesting, but these are
types and valuable types, types with which teachers should be familiar.
Some of these should be found in the teacher’s library and the teacher
should know the contents.
Then there is pure literature, the great poems and poets, the classics.
Read and own Lowell, Longfellow, Whittier, Emerson, and Holmes. Start
with Longfellow, and after you have read the others mentioned and have
them on your library shelves add others as you like. Read fiction of
course. Begin with the better class. Read Hawthorne, Scott, Dickens,
Eliot and others. Read some of the later fiction but do not waste time
on every piece of rag-time fiction that comes from the press. Teachers
do not have time to do it, and it would lead to intellectual imbecility
if they did. We are smothering in a deluge of light literature of the
rag-time class--literally smothering beneath it. Teachers at least
should be discriminating enough to select intelligently the things
worth reading, but are they?
But what about professional reading? If you neglect professional
reading you ignore the profession that you are striving to build up.
Read psychology, methods, history of education, and educational views
and discussions, and keep up on what is going on in administration
of schools and changes in school laws. This concerns you and should
be of interest to you. The lives of the great educational reformers
of the world, the lives of a few of our own educators like Horace
Mann, David Page, and others, should be of intense interest to you.
Books on management, books on method, books on the science and art of
instruction, books giving in detail the plans, methods and devices
for teaching and handling a school, how can such things lack interest
for you? Many of these represent the best experience of intelligent
teachers for years. They have pointed out to you their faults and
mistakes. They have shown you the way. You are not to follow such
books blindly. But read discriminately they will become guides to
you. They will save you from the pitfalls of others. They will save
you nerve force and strength by giving you clearer notions of what to
expect and how to secure it. They will help you to govern bad boys and
naughty girls. Ignore them and you start in to re-discover all the
pitfalls of the teacher. Then read the plans and devices that add spice
and interest. They represent successful experience. Then the deeper
educational works, those which point out principles, the books that
are for laying the foundation for a real science of education and to
prepare the way for a profession of teaching, shall teachers neither
read, own, nor care for such books and yet call themselves teachers,
professional teachers?
Before leaving the subject of the teacher’s library, I want to caution
against some mistakes. I have seen the libraries of many teachers.
I think I can make pretty accurate predictions from looking at the
library of the teacher’s judgment, standing, and teaching ability. It
is lamentable that so many young teachers are gulled into buying sets
of books--a set of Shakespeare, a set of Irving, a set of Dickens, a
set of Scott, a set of the library of history, or a set of the world’s
literature, etc.
Mark you, I do not throw stones at any particular collection of books.
I have every respect for the agent and the publishers of such books.
In fact, I always feel like taking my hat off to the book agent when
I meet one. As an orphan boy I was reared in a home where there were
more than ten acres of land for each book in the home. The few that
were there had been sold by enterprising book agents, who made them
think their future prosperity and soul’s salvation depended very
largely upon whether they bought the book or not. If he succeeded in
making them believe this and would knock off fifty cents and board out
half the balance they would sometimes buy the book. One of these books
touched me and gave me some aspirations that have influenced my life.
Blessings be upon the agent that sold it, if he is living. If he is
dead, may his soul rest in peace and prosperity attend his posterity.
It is not the particular set of books, nor the publisher, nor the
agent, but the foolish spending of money for what will not do the
good for you that half of it well spent would do. It is a reflection
upon a teacher’s judgment when he allows himself to be talked into
buying a large set of books, uniform in price and binding, and much
alike. What does the average young teacher want with a whole set of
Shakespeare, or a whole set of Scott, or of Dickens. Life is too short
to read all the works of very many authors. You want to be familiar,
genuinely familiar, with five or six of Shakespeare’s best plays. You
want to know well three or four of Scott’s best novels. You want to be
familiar--to have read, re-read and lived over again and again with the
author Dickens’ David Copperfield, his Tale of Two Cities, Little Nell,
and perhaps one or two others. But you do not have time to read all of
Dickens, and if you had the time you could better spend it in reading
one or two of the best of some other author rather than wading through
the worst of Dickens. No author, not even Shakespeare, can always be at
his best. The teacher who knows thoroughly the three or four best of
an author’s writings may well afford to be ignorant of the others, and
use the time in growing familiar with the best of some other author.
Select your library. Put some good volumes of history, biography,
travel, fiction, and great poems in it. Do not neglect your
professional books. If you have taught ten years and do not have at
least twenty-five professional books, you have very little professional
spirit, and ought to quit teaching or begin reading. Let your library
be a working library. Do not get all your books the same size, shape
and binding. Nothing is a greater give away on one’s library. Working
libraries are not that way. Libraries bought in bulk, bought for show,
bought not because you need them or want them, but because some firm
or agent is pushing their sale, these are in large sets. Such is an
infallible sign that your library was not built up as a working, usable
library--a growth, and not a full-grown product at one time.
Your library will be a fair index of your professional standing, and
the practiced eye can readily paint you after examining your library.