Library Work with Children

by Alice Isabel Hazeltine

A librarian or library assistant can do some of her best work in a Settlement club either in connection with the Settlement library or independently. Readings from Dickens can be illustrated by scenes acted in pantomime, with very simple properties. Indeed, we had not even a curtain when Miss La Creevy painted Kate's miniature, when the Savage and the Maiden danced their inimitable dance, when Mrs. Kenwigs and Morleena held a reception for Mrs. Crummles, the Phenomenon and the ladies of their company, when after they had recited from their star parts, Morleena had the soles of her shoes chalked and danced her fancy dance, and Henrietta Petowker took down her back hair and repeated "The Blooddrinker's Burial." The old man looked over the wall, too, and threw garden vegetables and languishing glances at Mrs. Nickleby who encouraged his advances. There was no time for the girls to learn the parts in the busy, crowded, late-open holiday evenings of department stores, but they all entered into the pantomime and interpreted the reading with spirit, as they did at another time in some of the Shakespeare scenes, Rosalind, Celia and Touchstone, Hamlet and Ophelia, Bottom and Titania, with attendant fairies, and Shylock and Portia. The Dickens scenes were repeated for a younger club, just trying its dramatic wings in charades, and when May-time came these younger girls of twelve to fifteen gave a very successful representation of an old English May-day with Robin Hood and his merry band, a Jester, a Dragon, a Hobby-horse and Jack in the Green, Maid Marian and the Lord and Lady of the May on the library green.

The opportunity of a library in a small town, where there is more leisure than in a city, is in the formation of young people's clubs. One day, a year or two ago, I visited three libraries on the Sound shore in Connecticut. In one, the librarian had made her basement useful out of library hours by organizing a class of chair-caning for boys who were beginning to hang around the streets, and were in danger of being compelled to learn the art in the Reform School if they did not acquire it as a means of keeping their hands from mischief at home. In the next town, the librarian mounted and identified all the moths and butterflies that the children brought to her and gave them insect books. In the library beyond, the children were formed into a branch of the Flower Mission in the nearest city. The club need not always be for reading, but must depend on the resources or interests of the boys and girls. There is no need of debating clubs in our library, for the city is full of them, but they may be the very best thing that the librarian in the next town can form.

A reading club must not necessarily be a club for the study or enjoyment of stories, history or poetry. Under the guidance of the kind of librarian who aims far above her audience, it may turn into something like Mr. Wopsle's quarterly examinations of his great aunt's school, "when what he did," says Pip, "was to turn up his cuffs, stick up his hair and give us Mark Antony's oration over the body of Caesar. This was always followed by Collins's Ode on the Passions, wherein I particularly venerated Mr. Wopsle as Revenge, throwing his bloodstained sword in thunder down, and taking the war-renouncing trumpet with a withering look." There may be a club for making things out of the Beard books, for the study of sleight-of- hand, for exchanging postcards with children in other countries and reading about the places on them. It may make historical pilgrimages to places of interest in the town or may collect stones and clay nodules, and read about them. The important thing is to find children of nearly the same age and neighborhood with interests in common, and let them decide whom they shall ask to join the club after it is formed. Better yet if they ask for the club in the first place. One not very long-lived Settlement club which I knew was of boys who wished to read and act Shakespeare, but a very few evenings convinced them that as they could not even read the lines without stumbling, they were not on the road to the actors' Temple of Fame. They were boys who had left school at fourteen in the lower grades, except one, who had taken his High School examinations and is now at the head of a department in a large department store and a prominent member of a political study club. The others, who had expected to play prominent Shakespearean parts with little or no work, were easily discouraged, dropped off and were seen no more. The reading of very simple plays at first is a good stepping-stone to a study of Shakespeare later, but the plays must be interesting enough to hold the attention of boys who do not read fluently.

LIBRARY CLUBS FOR BOYS AND GIRLS

The usefulness of the reading club as an opportunity of broadening the interests of the child is emphasized in the following paper, printed in the Library Journal, May, 1911, which gives an account of the organization of clubs under the direction of a supervisor in the Cleveland Public Library. Marie Hammond Milliken was born in Pittsburgh, Pa., was graduated from Wellesley College in 1905 and from the Training School for Children's Librarians in 1907; was children's librarian in the Cleveland Public Library from 1907 to 1910; Supervisor of reading clubs from 1910 to 1912, and since that time has been a branch librarian.

The 13-year-old president of one of the Cleveland library clubs said recently, in explaining the purpose of the club to a new member, "The idea of this club is to give you what you couldn't get anywhere else." This is a rather ambitious program. I should be slow to say that any club I have known has succeeded in doing that for its members. Considering the character of the communities in which the public library is generally placed, particularly the branches of a large library system, I am inclined to think, however, that clubs organized and conducted by the library offer to the children some things they are, at least, not likely to get anywhere else—and to the library another means of strengthening its effectiveness as an educational and social center in the community.

In speaking of library clubs, I have in mind the organized, self-governing club, with a small and definite membership, as distinguished from the reading circle. Definite organization means a constitution, officers, elections, parliamentary procedure —all the form and ceremonial so attractive to children of the club age. From the first meeting, when the constitution of the club comes up for discussion, the organization begins to develop the child's sense of responsibility. A simple form of parliamentary procedure will not only prove conducive to orderly and business like meetings, but, especially with young or immature children, delight in its formalities will help to hold the club together while interest in other phases of the club work is being developed.

The chief advantage of the self-government of the club is as a first lesson (frequently) in the principles of popular government. In the club the too-assertive child learns wholesome respect for the will of the majority, while his more retiring brother discovers that one man's vote is as good as another's. When one has seen a club of ambitious lads who, when they first organized, cared only for success, reject a boy who is a good debater and athlete on the ground that in another club he had shown that "he was a sorehead and couldn't seem to understand that the majority's got to rule," one is tempted to feel that organization can do so much for the children that an organized library club justifies itself on that score alone.

Club work is a very effective means of extending the active educational work of the library. In the clubs conducted by the Cleveland Public Library, the plan has been to encourage the children themselves to make suggestions for the club work. Then a tentative program is made out, based on some general interest shown in the suggestions made by the club. As far as possible, the program is planned with the idea of stimulating broad, as well as careful and intelligent reading. The program is, of course, subject to changes which may suggest themselves to the club or to its leader. Travel in foreign lands, the study of the lives of great women, nature study, the reading and discussion of Shakespeare's plays, in the girls' clubs, and, in the clubs for boys, debating and reporting on current events, have been the subjects most successfully worked out for club consideration, probably on account of the variety of interest which they present. Travel means not only the manners and customs side of the country—it means the art, the literature, the history, the legend; biography, not simply the life of the individual studied, but the period and country that produced it. The subjects discussed in the debating clubs are almost always of the boys' choosing, and represent a broad field of interest, economic, social, moral and political. They range from "Resolved, That Washington did more than Lincoln for his country," "That civilization owes more to the railroad than the steamboat," "That the fireman is braver than the policeman," in the clubs of boys from the sixth and seventh grades, to the discussion of municipal ownership, tariff commission, establishment of a central bank, and commission government for cities, in clubs composed of high school boys. Aside from what practice in the form of debating means to the boys in developing ability to think clearly and to speak to the point, discussion of vital questions of national and municipal interest encourages the boy to turn to more trustworthy sources of information than the daily press. He learns to refer to books and the better sort of periodicals for his authority, and, gradually, through reading and discussion, begins to substitute convictions for inherited prejudice or indifference.

The club's greatest usefulness lies in the opportunity it presents of broadening the interests of the child, of opening to him, through books and discussion, new fields of thought and pleasure. Compared with this, information acquired and number of books read are comparatively unimportant. The smallness of the group with which he has to deal and the children's invariable response to his special interest in them create an unusual opportunity for the club leader. In the informal discussions in the club he may pass on to the children something of his own interests, and direct theirs into channels which would probably never be opened to them otherwise. From our experience in one of the branches of the Cleveland Public Library, where club work has presented great difficulties, I know that, given a leader who understands, girls whose standard of excellence has been met by boarding- school stories, can be interested in studying and reading in their club the plays of Shakespeare or in listening to extracts from Vasari's "Lives of the painters" or Ruskin's "Stories of Venice." Beyond his opportunity to interest the club in better reading, the leader may help the children in a general way, by unconsciously presenting to them his standards of thought and conduct. Through him they may become aware of finer ideals of courtesy, bravery and honesty.