A Librarian's Open Shelf: Essays on Various Subjects

by Arthur E. Bostwick

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: