Library Essays; Papers Related to the Work of Public Libraries

by Arthur E. Bostwick

On the contrary, all that the money does is to make possible success on a large and sensational scale—without the proper spirit and the proper workers the result might be failure on a scale quite as sensational. And an enthusiastic spirit, a high aim and unflagging energy—these are things that no money can buy and that will bring success on the small scale as on the large one.

We are fortunate—we who have charge of libraries and are trying to do something worth while with them—that there is perhaps less of the spirit of pure commercialism among us than among some other classes of workers. For this, in part, we have to thank our inadequate salaries. Persons who desire to work simply for the material reward will select some other field. We are glad to get our reward—we certainly earn it; but I venture to say that in the case of most of us there is also something in the work that appeals to us. And that something is the thing that, pushed to its furthest extent, will bring the dawn of to-day into the most backward library. It is not a very inspiring thing simply to sit down and watch a pile of books—hardly more so, I should think, than to take care of a pile of bricks or a load of turnips. Interest, enthusiasm, inspiration, come with realization of the fact that every one of those books has a mission and that it is the librarian’s business to find what it is and to see that it is performed. In the large, wealthy institution this duty may be accompanied by the expenditure of vast sums, and may be performed with the aid of things that only large sums of money can buy; in the small library there may be but a single librarian and only a few dollars to spend. But, just as in the case of a city librarian with an ample salary, she has open to her the choice of those three types of librarianship—the day before yesterday, yesterday and to-day.

And how about the librarian of to-morrow? Perhaps it may be as well to leave him or her for future consideration; but I cannot help saying just a word. May it not be that in the days to come we shall have enough civic pride to do whatever we may find to do—in our libraries or anywhere else, not with our eyes fixed only upon the work itself, important as that may be, but with the broader viewpoint of its effect upon the whole community? May it not be that this librarian of to-morrow will ask not, “Will it raise my circulation?” or even “Will it improve the quality of my reading?” but “Will it better the reading that is done in this community?” That librarian will not rejoice that his library circulation of good novels has dropped, when he realizes that twice as many bad novels are bought and read outside. He will be pleased that the children in his library have learned to wash their hands, but chiefly because he hopes that what they have learned may react upon the physical cleanliness—and perhaps on the moral cleanliness, too—of the community. Much as he will love the library, he will love it as an agency for the improvement of the community in which he lives and works, and he will do nothing for its aggrandizement, expansion or improvement that involves a change of the community in the opposite direction. We shall not see one library rejoicing because it has enticed away the users of some other library; we may even see a library rejoicing that it has lost its readers in Polish history, we will say, when it becomes known that they have gone to another library with a better collection in that subject.

I confess that I am looking forward to the day when we shall take this view—when the adage “Every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost” may be forgotten among institutions in the same town. The policy that it represents makes for high speed, perhaps, but not for solidarity. In a fight such as we are waging with the forces of ignorance and indifference we should all keep shoulder to shoulder. This is why the librarian should say: “I am a citizen; nothing in this city is without interest to me.” That is why he should be a librarian of to-day, and why he may even look forward with hopefulness to the dawn of a still better to-morrow.

SCHOOL LIBRARIES AND MENTAL TRAINING

Is it more important in education to impart definite items of information or to train the mind so that it will know how to acquire and wish to acquire? To ask the question is to answer it; yet we do not always live up to our lights.

In the older methods the teacher, or rather his predecessors, decided what it would be necessary for the child to memorize, and then he was made to memorize, while still without appreciation of the need of so doing. We are perhaps in danger today of going to the other extreme. We require so little memorization by the student that the memory, as a practical tool of everyday life, is in danger of falling into disuse. It is surely possible for us to exercise our pupils’ memories, to develop them, and to control them, without giving them the fatal idea that memory is a substitute for thought, or that the assimilation of others’ ideas, perfect though it may be, will altogether take the place of the development of one’s own. There are still things that one must learn by heart, but since they must be retained below the threshold of consciousness, it is well that if possible they should also be acquired below that threshold. The problem of consciously learning a quantity of items of any kind and then relegating them to one’s subconsciousness in such a way that they will be available at any given time is not, of course, impossible. Most of us have at our disposal many facts that we have learned in this way; but I venture to assert that most of us have lost a large proportion of what we thus acquired. Now a man never learns by rote the names of his relations, the positions of the rooms in his house, the names of the streets in his town. He has acquired them subconsciously as he needs them. When the human mind becomes convinced of the need of information of this kind “in its business,” the acquiring comes as a matter of course. In a language, the paradigms may be learned unconsciously when the pupil sees that they are necessary in order to understand an interesting passage; the multiplication table and tables of weights and measures require no conscious memorization; or at least such memorization may be undertaken voluntarily as a recognized means to a desired end. I say these things may be done; I am sure that they are in many schools; I am equally sure that they were unheard of in my own boyhood; that is, as recognized methods in teaching. Of course, in spite of schools and teachers and methods, a vast amount of information and training has always been acquired in this way. I do not remember ever “learning to read” as a set task. I am sure that none of my children ever did so. We recognized the desirability of knowing how. We wanted to learn, and so we learned; that is all. Of course our teachers and parents and friends helped us along.

Is not this what the school is for—to make the pupil anxious to learn and then to help him? When all schools are conducted on this principle, we shall be very happy, but apparently it is not so simple as it would appear.

What we should try to approximate, at all events, is an emancipation from the thraldom of unwillingness on the part of the pupil—to bring it about that he shall desire to learn and will take what measures he can to do so, gladly availing himself of what help we can offer him.

I have said that what we need is to stimulate the pupil’s desire and then to satisfy it. I have known teachers who were competent to do both—who could take an ignorant, unwilling pupil and make of him an enthusiast, thirsting for knowledge, in a few weeks. We all know of the ideal university whose faculty consisted of Mark Hopkins on one end of a log. I am sorry the creator of that epigram put his teacher on a log. There are plenty of logs, and, from this fact, too many persons, I am afraid, have leaped to the conclusion that there are also plenty of Mark Hopkinses. I fear that one trouble with educators is that, hitching their wagons to stars, they have assumed the possibility that terrestrial luminaries also are able to raise us to the skies. If we had a million Mark Hopkinses and a million boys for them to educate, we should need only a sufficient quantity of logs; we should be forever absolved from planning school-houses and making out schedules, from writing textbooks and establishing libraries. As it is, we must do all these things. We must adopt any and all devices to arouse and hold the pupil’s interest, and we must similarly seek out and use all kinds of machinery to satisfy that interest when once aroused. Of these devices and machines, the individual teacher, with or without his textbooks, lectures, recitations, laboratory work, and formal courses, is only one, and perhaps in some cases not the one to be preferred as the primary agent. Among such devices I believe that a collection of books, properly selected, disposed, and used can be made to play a very important part, both in arousing interest in a subject and in satisfying it—in other words in teaching it properly.