NORMAL SCHOOLS AND THEIR RELATION TO LIBRARIANSHIP
That there is a close relation between librarianship and the forces of education is implied both in the special topic of this paper and in the general theme of the morning: "Children and young people; their conditions at home, in the school, and in the library." Indeed librarian and teacher have more in common than we yet think. For real library work is teaching, and real teaching is guidance in living, and to live well for thy neighbor and thyself is—real library work.
The burden of this discussion will be, not whether the library is an integral part of education, but rather what modern education, as an art, science, and practice, has to say about the attitude and method and practice of library work. With open mind and modest, may we attempt a statement of "library pedagogy" to parallel current educational practice? How may we librarians knit our work more effectively into the educational fabric? How best correlate people and books?
If such a statement of library pedagogy is possible, even though tentative, it is worth our while. From college days there rings in my ears the topic of an address by Dr. Samuel B. McCormick, now President of the University of Pittsburgh: "We can achieve that which we can intelligently conceive and adequately express." We must see our whole job through and through if we are to cope with our friends who do not yet see what we are at. The good brother, a Ph. D. of one of our best universities, a successful city school superintendent, now a fellow professor, who said, "I can see how instruction of our normal school students in library methods will help them in their work here, but how will it help them as teachers? Anyone can find a book in a school library." The superintendent who complained that all his pupils got at the public library was sore eyes and ruined minds from reading trashy fiction; the library trustee who likened library work and salary to dry-goods counter service and wage; the typewriter salesman who objected to open shelves and book wagons and story hours, because they cost—I won't say how much he said; what infinite patience, what skillful teaching power must we librarians have, to turn this tide and use it?
Lest we paint the picture too darkly, let it be said with all thankfulness and cheer that multitudes of teachers, superintendents, boys, girls, men and women, do understand. There is Superintendent Condon, formerly of Providence, now of Cincinnati, of whom Mr. Foster says in the last (1912) Providence report: "Mr. Condon's co-operation with the library was constant, intelligent, and effective." There is Mary Antin and her brothers and sisters, Americans all, to whom one of the richest gifts of the "Promised Land" is the public library. There is State Superintendent Alderman, of Oregon, and Mrs. Alderman. There is the United States Commissioner of Education, Mr. Claxton, and Mrs. Claxton. In every state are men like a western Kansas superintendent (way out next to Colorado, on the prairies), who found his community destitute of books; even school books and tablets had to be ordered by the drug store from a distant city; no community interest, no debating societies, no class plays, no school athletic teams. He made school vital to the boys and girls. Then because to his thinking education does not end with school days, and because he had the library vision, before he was there a year he passed the subscription paper, organized the library association, got the books and magazines, and opened the public library. He gave that town something to live for. And every state has librarians like the little Kansas lady in a country community who does reference work and draws patrons from sixteen surrounding school districts by the use of the rural telephone.
What have the normal schools to do with all this? Before answering this question, it may be well to note that the term "normal school" has not always the same significance. In the United States there are 194 public normal schools. Scholastic standards are of three general types: First, the old-time normal school, whose graduates have little more than completed a high school course including some required pedagogy. Second, the largest division, the two-year normal school, which requires two years of college cultural and professional work, high school graduation being required for entrance. Third, the normal college or state teachers' college, which grants the bachelor's degree for the completion of four years of college cultural and professional work. As a rule the graduates of the high school normal course go into the rural or the small-town schools; the graduates of the two-year college course, into elementary schools and special subjects; and the graduates of the four-year college course, into high school subjects, principalships, and superintendencies. The four-year state teachers' colleges of the United States can be counted on the ten fingers, and their ultimate sphere of influence is being debated. It would seem, however, that the adequate teacher-training institution must be as broad in its facilities and standards as are the conditions of modern life with which teachers must cope.
In the normal schools of these three types, student attendance varies from 100 to nearly 3,000, the average being about 600. Faculties vary from 8 or 10 members to 125. Equipment varies correspondingly, the better schools having very complete facilities. For example, the Eastern Illinois State Normal School, at Charleston, which is said to have a faculty ranking in scholarship with the universities, has 1,200 students, 31 members of faculty, offers two college years of teacher-training, has three buildings, a library of 16,000 volumes, and like many other normal schools of its type has an assured future and a fine field of influence. You will pardon another example, I hope, cited because I can be still more definite in describing it: The Kansas State Normal School, at Emporia, is a type of the four-year normal college. It was established in 1865. Last year it had 2,750 students, 350 in the training school (comprising kindergarten and grades one to eight), 1,100 in the normal high school, and 1,300 in the college. It had a faculty of 100, nearly half of these being men, many of the best universities being represented. It has 11 buildings, including an enormous gymnasium, a library, a hospital, a training school, science building, etc. It has a department of library science, in charge of a professor giving full time to that department, and on the same plane as other departments of instruction. Of this same general type, in equipment, numbers, and standards, are the schools at Ypsilanti, Michigan; Cedar Falls, Iowa; Kirksville, Missouri; Greeley, Colorado; Terre Haute, Indiana;—I do not mean to slight other worthy examples.
Aside from these three types of public normal schools, another important type of teacher-training organization is the department of education and psychology in our best colleges and universities, exemplified notably by the School of Education of the University of Chicago, and Teachers' College of Columbia University, the last-named being perhaps the most efficient teachers' college in the world. I hasten to add mention of the conspicuously helpful work in educational psychology, pure and applied, which is being done at Clark University, Massachusetts, under the inspiring leadership of Dr. G. Stanley Hall.
Now, using the term "normal schools" to include all of these types of institutions and as representing their practices and ideals, may we ask the question we left a moment ago, "What have the normal schools to do with librarianship?" This: The normal schools have now consciously taken up the task of preparing teachers who understand the life that now is and can teach boys and girls to live that life and to be useful members of society here and hereafter. These organized institutions of teacher-training take themselves seriously, they accept the responsibility of their task, and they are measurably succeeding; despite the declarations of popular magazines and investigating committees that our schools are a colossal failure. Which they are not, for didn't they train Mary Antin, and Miss Stearns, and you and me? If librarianship is educational work, and it is, the normal schools may therefore have some suggestion of educational practice worthy the consideration of librarians.
What is the educational world thinking and doing? Examine the program of the National Education Association, to meet week after next at Salt Lake City. I group some of the topics from the general sessions: First, What is education?; Education for freedom; The personal element in our educational problems; Teaching, and testing the teaching of essentials; Measuring results. Second, What shall we do with the single-room school?; The rural school; Fundamental reorganizations demanded by the rural life problem; Rural betterments; The schoolhouse evening center. Third, moral values in pupil self-government, The high school period as a testing time, Public schools and public health.
Relate these groups of topics with this definition of education from the late Andrew S. Draper, of honored memory:
"Education that has life and enters into life; education that makes a living and makes life worth living; education that can use English to express itself; education that does not assume that a doctor must be an educated man and that a mechanic or a farmer cannot be; education that appeals to the masses, that makes better citizens and a greater state; education that supports the imperial position of the State and inspires education in all of the States—that is the education that concerns New York."
Mingle with educational men and women, search the educational periodicals and programs, scan the educational books, visit the normal colleges; and I think you will discover that something like this is happening in the educational world: The content of education is being adapted to meet the needs of all the classes and the masses. The method of education is being adapted to the individual. The result is that education is being universalized, socialized, democratized.
In this adaptation of educational material and method, all eyes are upon the individual child. We are studying this child, working for him. We are playing for the batter, tackling the man with the ball. We believe it is more important to develop the undiscovered resource than to run all boys and all girls through the same hopper. A phrase used in the School Arts Magazine for May, 1913, in describing a notable Boston exhibit of art illustration, breathes this spirit: "Instruction in illustration, should be creative and individual from the outset. Models are posed to help in expressing more truthfully the conception of the illustrator rather than as a discipline in abstract drawing."
The true teacher never gives up a boy or a girl. But mind you, we are saving the individual, making a man out of him, not that he may be a self-centered unsocial phenomenon, but that he may be a fellow among men, a useful social unit. We want strong individuality willing and able to live in society.
Perhaps the biggest word in current education is motivation. That word motivation covers a multitude of sins and a multitude of virtues. Motivation does not mean coddling. It does not mean allowing the child to do as he pleases. On the other hand, motivation does not mean forcing an unnatural process or situation upon a helpless child or a helpless public. It does not mean that we are to give something to the child. Motivation is not didactic in attitude.
The spring of action in all of us is impulse. There is no time here to go into the psychology of instinct, impulse, emotion, motive, action, and all that. Suffice it for example that through the play instinct and impulse the wise teacher leads the child to a respect for fair-play, order, law, justice. The child never knows where he got it, but he has what he needed, and he has it indelibly. This process assumes a God-given wisdom on the part of the teacher: to know how that little mind is working, what it needs, how it may be brought to feel the need, and then to lead, draw out, educate that mind—O, miracle of miracles!
A step further in the consideration of the educational process: Perhaps there have been committed more atrocities, more crimes in the name of education, in the high school than in any other period of school life. More fairly stated, the crimes have been in the upper six years of the usual twelve,—in that period which is called adolescence. Why do so many boys and girls drop out of the upper grades? Why do so many youths never complete high school? The vocational training people have one answer, and it consists in letting the boy work at something of which he feels the need. They motivate his work. The boy from the farm can't read Tennyson's "Princess;" set him at the Breeder's Gazette or the testing of seed-corn; you can teach him English as readily through one task as the other. Only that boy never would learn English from "The Princess,"—and I love Tennyson.
As an example of skillful motivation in teaching may I describe a case which is also an object-lesson to librarians in correlating people and books? It is a third-year high school class in argumentation. After some preliminary study, one day the teacher remarks rather inconsequentially, "Do you know I believe the 'Boston tea party' was an unjustifiable destruction of property, and that unprejudiced historians now admit it?" Now that won't "go" in Kansas any easier than it will in Massachusetts. Teacher is immediately challenged, and she replies, "Well, I'll debate it with you; and I'll be fair and square with you and tell you of some material on your side. But there is one man whose authority I would not want to dispute; you'll surely treat me fairly, won't you?" A young lady member of the class at once puts a motion to the class that it will not be considered fair to use the writings of Edmund Burke against teacher. Does that class depend upon bluffing its way through that debate with teacher? No, it keeps us busy at the library to get material out fast enough, even though we had been previously informed by the teacher that the material would be wanted. Even Dr. Johnson's "Taxation no tyranny" is read with eagerness. Teacher finally agrees to debate even against Burke. Is Burke a bore to that class? Why, the library has to buy additional copies. Of course, the end desired by the teacher all the time was Burke.
More and more, in the instruction of adolescent and adult, the teacher's effort is being directed toward arousing a problem to be solved. Whether by a class lecture, by a class discussion, or by a personal conference, the pupil is brought to feel that it is important for him to find the answer. Is it not important, then, for the librarian to be skilled in drawing out a statement of the problem, or, changing the figure, to recognize accurately the symptoms and to prescribe unerringly? I think librarians having to do with high school and college students should rather frequently visit classes and attend lectures. If this were done, the pupil would less often be ground between upper and nether millstone, and the millstones would think more of each other.
Thus far, educational ideals and practices. Now will they help us any in attempting to formulate a library pedagogy? I believe they will. I believe that the teaching attitude, the study of the individual, the putting of the individual's needs far and away before the observance of inflexible rule and practice, and the determination to correlate people and books and life to the very ends of the earth,—these four stones at least will be in the foundation of library pedagogy.
I am not sure that all educational people will agree entirely with the foregoing statement of educational principles and methods. I am quite sure that I may as well gracefully hand my head now to some of you because of the following library corollaries of the preceding educational doctrines. Some of these are my own beliefs, some are beliefs of educational men regarding libraries:
In the training of librarians, would it be more in accord with modern pedagogy to have less lecturing, less practice work done in the this-is-the-only-way-to-do-it attitude, and to have more of the come-on-and-let's-find-out, the learn-by-doing laboratory spirit?
Educational administration is being remodeled, centralized. If library work is to be more and more educational, school men have said to me, why not make the public library an integral part of the city school system, and the state library and state library commission an arm of the state department of education? It is a terrible thought, but it will not drown by denying it.
When library work becomes educational through and through, and all library assistants are experts in psychology and human nature, the fines system will be a thing of the past.
Conservation of the individual means that it is better to have a book in use than to have it lying peacefully on the shelf entirely surrounded by unbroken rules.
Conservation of society means that it is better to have the library open on holidays and Sundays, when the working man isn't "dead tired," than to report an increased circulation of fiction.
The PRESIDENT: For an object lesson as to the strenuous life we go to Oyster Bay. For library buildings we go to East Ninety-first street, New York, or when he is in Europe we go to Skibo Castle. For information as to the latest inventions we go to the laboratory of Mr. Edison. For full information as to the best in high school work we go to the Girls' High School in Brooklyn. Miss MARY E. HALL.
Miss Hall spoke extemporaneously upon the enlarging scope of library work in high schools. Some of the points discussed were treated by her in a paper before the section on Library Work with Children at the Ottawa conference, 1912. See Ottawa Proceedings in Bulletin of the American Library Association, v. 6, p. 260-68.
The PRESIDENT: As my eye roves over this audience I see it is thickly sprinkled with punctuation marks. It has been suggested that some of our papers ought to be discussed from the floor. We shall be glad to hear from any librarians who are in this audience, either in the form of experiences or comment.
Mr. OLIN S. DAVIS: While I approve fully all that the last speaker has said, I feel very strongly that the college or high school library should not be too complete and that the student should be encouraged to use the public library. Work should be given to the students in high schools and girls' schools that would require their coming to the public library, because if the children in the grades and high schools do not learn to use the public library in those years they will not be apt to use the library in later years when they have left school.
Miss HALL: I would like to say that the first thing we do with pupils is to take a census of the entering class to find out how many do not have cards in the public library; interview them to see why they have not; even to write letters to the parents and urge them to allow their children to have cards; and to see before the end of the first term that every student in the entering class has a card in the public library, has a note of introduction from the school librarian to the branch librarian of the public library, and to see that the branch librarian of our big cities and the high school librarian work together four years with that student. We have the very closest co-operation.
Miss AHERN: Most of you reading library literature lately have seen considerable criticism of the fact that when students go out from college they do not know how to use the library. That is sometimes the student's fault, but most often it is the fault of the college curriculum. That is a topic we need not discuss here. But I believe librarians will do a great service to those who are going into college activities if they emphasize and elaborate that idea of putting into the requirements for college entrance, a knowledge of how to use library machinery.
There are a good many things that are necessary for students to know before they are able to take up the work in colleges, particularly in literature and language. I am not saying that these should be any less. But here is something that I wonder no one has ever thought of before. It means a good deal more to a student to know how to use the various reference books in the college library on, say, the works of John Milton, than to have read some of the things which are included in the entrance examination. I think the idea of requiring a knowledge of how to use the library for college entrance is the best thing I have heard at a library meeting for a long time, and I hope the librarians who are present will impress that idea on their superintendents of schools, on their high school principals, and on the college authorities, as far as they can. It is a good thing. If we should not get anything else out of this 1913 meeting but to impress on the school people that a knowledge of how to use the library is a necessary requirement for a college course, we shall have gained a great point.
Mr. RANCK: I should like to ask Miss Hall about her experience with reference to the use of the library on the teaching of English and literature in the high school.
Miss HALL: I have been very much interested in this. Our school has been so large it has been very difficult to do all we would like to do. We have not been able to do what has been done in the Detroit or Grand Rapids high school in the way of instruction. But I have been interested in seeing what it has done for the English and the history departments. In the first place, our teachers are coming with their classes for instruction and the teachers are learning a great many things which they are putting in practice. For the last year we have done more with the Reader's Guide in history than ever before. Teachers are assigned to help me in my work. After they heard the talk on the Reader's Guide they said, "We can do this: we will go through the Reader's Guide and we will bring out everything that is really interesting on the history of France, Germany, China, Russia and the Balkan War; we will look over those articles and make a card of the best things." They are using the Reader's Guide in English more than ever before; they are using reference books more. After the talk on the Statesmen's Yearbook and on the almanacs and some of the yearbooks, such as the New International Yearbook, they are using them almost as textbooks. The Statesmen's Yearbook is in use nearly all the time, as is the New International Yearbook, since that talk. They are using the Reader's Guide for new material—essays that they want on special subjects, and are using it for debate work, informal debates on all sorts of interesting current problems for English work, training the students to do oral debating without any notes, and talks on the topics of the day. They are using encyclopedias more wisely than they used to. Teachers used to send scholars to encyclopedias for everything. And when we talked about the real use of encyclopedias and bibliographies, how the encyclopedia simply gave you a certain amount of definite information and often led to more important things, they began using those bibliographies.
Miss HOBART: I do not know that any librarian has been trying to work out the problem which I have of reaching the public school pupils and teachers. Some of the best things that I have found in that way are these: I made myself familiar, as early in the term as possible, with the teachers and the conditions of their home life. I found that some had very poor places to room, as they are apt to have in small communities, and to those I offered the use of the library rooms for evening use and for time out of school when they wished to correct papers. Our library is warm and light in the winter and cool and light in the summer. And the teachers were extremely glad to have a place where they could come and be quiet and comfortable and do their own work. I think that last year the teachers in our small village practically lived in the library. Even those who had homes there used to make it their abiding place most of their waking hours. For the high school pupils, at the time of their graduating essays, we laid books aside in different places in the library. Many of those children had no proper places at home where they could write. They came to the library and did their work; almost all the work on their graduating essays was done evenings. For six weeks we gave the use of our catalog rooms to two girls who had their books sent there. There were several out-of-town children; to those we gave a room in the basement. They came from school as quickly as possible at noon, ate their luncheon in a very short time and spent the rest of the intermission in the library doing reference work. The expressions of appreciation we have received and the consciousness of the help given to those children in the use of the library has been a great source of satisfaction.
Adjourned.