Library Essays; Papers Related to the Work of Public Libraries

by Arthur E. Bostwick

It is not necessary here to remark that education is what its name implies—a drawing out, a development of potentialities. Because it is this, and only this, it will never make a Shakespeare or a Newton out of one who has it not “in him,” as the idiom so well runs, to become one or the other. Because it is this, there are men who do have in them potentialities of usefulness, perhaps even of greatness, but who for lack of it, die undeveloped; “mute” and “inglorious.”

From the moment when the new-born babe feels the contact of the outer world, through his organs of sense, that contact begins to develop his possibilities. Here education begins, and it ceases only with the stoppage of all functions at death. When it has gone on so far that a contact is established with other human minds, this development takes a special turn that differentiates it from any training that the lower animals receive—that makes it a link in the education of the race. Still further is this accentuated when the child begins to have access to the printed records of the race in the shape of books.

Books, or no books, his educational development goes on, at home, among his playmates, in his chosen work in shop, farm or office, but the use of books gives it a wider relationship—a broader outlook. This relation of our formal intellectual records to education which is emphasized especially during the period of attendance at school or college, makes a storehouse of books of peculiar value and importance to a community. Especially should the existence of such a collection direct the attention of every person in the community to the fact that the use of books to develop the mind and broaden the possibilities does not properly end with the close of the school life. It is the misfortune of the school, in too many instances, that its work engenders a hatred of books instead of a love for them. Play, we are told, is “work that you don’t have to do.” It is the merit of the library that there is no compulsion about its use. We dislike what is forced upon us, but the study which is the hardest of work in a school may become recreation when one is free to follow the line of inclination among the books of a well-made collection. In this way the post-scholastic education, if we may call it so, which lasts as long as the life, is kept in touch with the written records, instead of casting those records aside and proceeding haphazard wholly on so-called “practical” lines. The teachers express this, when they admit the public library at all into the educational pantheon, by saying that it may “continue the work of the school.” This is a one-sided way of looking at the matter—as one-sided as it would be to say that the function of the school is to prepare people for the use of the public library—a statement no less and no more true than the other. The proper way to put it is that the school and the library have closely related educational functions, both employing largely the written records of previous attainment, but the school concentrating its influence on a short period of peculiar susceptibility, with the aid of enforced personal discipline and exposition, while the library works without such opportunities, but also freed from these limitations. Thus the library uses books as a means of development, not with the aid of personal influence, but without taskmasters; not without discipline, but without compulsion. During the years of school attendance, it works with the school, and it recognizes the fact that its use is a habit best acquired early. This is the reason for our separate rooms for children, with their special collections and trained assistants, and also for our efforts to co-ordinate the child’s reading with his school work. We are not trying to set up a rival educational system, which by its superior attractiveness may divert the attention of the child from school; we are merely seeing that our young people may become accustomed to use books properly, to love them dearly and to look upon the place where they are housed as in some sense an intellectual refuge through life.

This closeness of contact with a public collection of books is largely a modern idea. In ancient times the safeguarding and preservation of the individual book was far more important than it is today. Greater public security, and especially the improvement in methods of duplication, have now made such care unnecessary, except in the case of volumes kept as curiosities, or for occasional use. The book that does the most for popular education is not kept behind bars, but sent out broadcast for free use, shortly perishing in the flesh to be reincarnated in fresh paper, type and binding. Sending out books for home use has added enormously to the educational value of the library and to the good done by books—to the number of points of contact of mind with mind. Along the same line has been the development of subsidiary centers of distribution—branch libraries, traveling libraries, delivery stations. All these have added to the tendency to look upon the public library as a center of municipal education. In many communities it is being looked to now as such a center in matters having no direct connection with books. It is a museum on a small scale; a lecture bureau; the maker, sometimes the publisher, of lists and bibliographies. In old times the local collector of minerals or of prints turned over his crystals or his pictures to the school; now, as likely as not, he gives them to the library. It is better that he should; for in the educational life of the individual, the school comes and goes, but the library goes on forever.

It is this capacity of the modern library to reach out beyond its own walls in many different directions that makes it proper for us to speak of it as a center. In a similar way the physicist speaks of centers of force. And as a body exerting attraction or repulsion—a magnetic pole, an electrified sphere, a gravitating particle—is surrounded by a field of force which is very real, though invisible, so there are invisible lines that connect such an intellectual center as the library with every interest in the community. We recognize this in our colloquial speech. Did you never hear of a network of branch libraries? Yet on a map they show merely a system of dots. The network is formed of the commingling fields of force, which together enmesh the community in a web of intellectual influences. And as an ordinary force has two aspects, so the influences radiating from our library centers are directed both from and toward them. The up-to-date library strikes out toward every member of the community and it strives to draw each one to itself. It sends its books into every home, its helpful aids to reading and to study, its library news and gossip in the local paper: but on the other hand, its cozy rooms, its well-stocked reference shelves, its willing and pleasant attendants exert on every man, woman and child in the community an intellectual attraction, and having let them taste of the delights it has to offer sends him out again as a willing missionary to lure in others. By such methods should the library strive to be a center of mental development in a community; by such methods is it succeeding, for no other center can vie with it in the universality of its appeal, whether we follow the individual from birth to death, or regard the various members of a community as they exist at one specified time.

But there is another sense in which the library should be and is able to serve as the intellectual center of a community. A community’s moral and intellectual status is not simply the sum of that of its component members. This is true of all aggregates where the components are interrelated in any way. In all such cases the properties of the whole depend, it is true, on the properties of the components, but not by simple addition. The taste of common salt is not the taste of sodium added to that of chlorine; the feelings, thoughts and acts of any aggregate of men may be quite different from those of the men taken individually. This is true whether the aggregate be simply a body of spectators in a theater, mutually related only by the fact of their common presence in the place, or an association, or the members of a municipal community. The human aggregate is in all cases less advanced than the individual; it is more primitive in its emotions, its morals, its acts. This might be expected, since the formal group, of whatever kind, began its evolution later than the individual. A community’s moral sense is thus less advanced than that of its members; it will lie, swindle and steal, when they would hesitate to do so; it will resort to violence sooner than they. Its intellectual ability is also less; its business transactions are looser; its appreciation of artistic values is inferior.

The education of a group of men, as a group, is thus something different from the education of its individual members. In the case of a loose group, such as an audience, it could not be attempted; with a group dwelling together and bound by ties of blood and common interest it is not only possible but quite worth while.

Of course it must be understood that whatever educates the individual also helps to educate the community; but when, as is almost always the case, the community lags behind, something may be done to bring its ideals, feelings and acts nearer to the individual standard, even without altering the latter.

Now we have already been reminded by Prof. Vincent of Chicago university that the library may act as the social memory; the town library should therefore be emphatically the municipal memory. And as memory is the basis of our intellectual life, so a communal memory of this kind will serve as the basis of the community’s intellectual life and as a means through which it may be fostered and advanced. As the individual looks back with interest on his own personal history and refreshes his recollection by means of family portraits, old letters, diaries, scrapbooks and material of all kinds, so the community should retain consciousness of the continuity of its own history by keeping in the public library full records of similar import—files of all local publications, printed memorabilia of all kinds, material for local history, even to the point of imagined triviality; even private letters, when these bear in any way on the community life. The legal and political history, or, at last, its dry bones, is locked up in the official archives or the town or city; we need, in addition, an intellectual and social hall of records out of which the delver in local history may clothe this skeleton with flesh and blood.

A man with a memory has the basis for a mind and a conscience; so a community with this kind of a collective memory is much more ’apt than another to develop collective intelligence and collective morality. It may be asserted, not as a figure of speech, but as a cold fact, that a community whose citizens look back upon an honorable history with records preserved in an accessible place, ought to be much less likely to sanction a trolley steal or to wink-at official graft.