Rightly directed, library influences in elementary schools would modify the machine-like formula giving to all children alike at the same time the same mental food to eat and the same moral garb to wear. As Dr. Bird T. Baldwin notes in his ingenious statement of the five ages of childhood, school children are inevitably different; even when children are born on the same day, the chances that they will grow physically, mentally and morally at exactly the same rate, and will make exactly the same progress in school, are remote indeed.
A teacher-librarian having special aptitude for the post could render service of inestimable value to teachers as well as to their pupils, in becoming the active medium between public school and public library. By securing the right books from the library for home reading, by providing picture material and reference sources for class room use, by conducting story hours and reading clubs, by giving instruction in the use of the library and the keys that open books, by giving stimulus to the ambitions and capacities of individual pupils, by intimate co-operation with the work of vocational guidance, the librarian would prove her worth. Nor would the least useful function of the school libraries be that of an evening study place for those tens of thousands of children whose home conditions absolutely preclude thought of, or opportunity for, study out of school hours.
It may be contended that these services are provided by branch libraries and their juvenile departments. What are the facts? Early in the present month twenty million boys and girls went more or less willingly to school. Our consolidated library statistics show that considerably less than one million of them use our public libraries. Despite our imposing figures of circulation, we reach but 5 per cent of the juvenile population.
If there are urgent reasons for increased library effort in connection with grade schools, these apply with multiplied force as to high schools. Here, indeed, the deterrent factor of enormous and prohibitive cost would not obtain, because they are fewer in number; and in proportion to total cost of maintenance, the added percentage of cost would be comparatively small. There are in the United States 8,300 high schools with a four-year course, and 3,250 carrying a three-year course. In every one of the 11,500 high schools there should be a well-equipped and well-administered library. Preferably, those that are located in cities where there are strong public libraries should be conducted as branches of the local public library. Such management would assure better administration. School management would imperil in many instances the selection of librarians fitted for the task. Too often, as experience has demonstrated, the governing body would assign to the post derelict teachers unfitted by reason of age or physical handicap, and unfortunate deficiencies in other respects. On the other hand, public library authorities must recognize more tangibly than they do now that high school librarians must possess not only library training in the machinery of routine performance, but also university education, teaching experience, and qualifications of personality and temperament that will place them on a level with other members of the faculty.
In the high schools we find the sifted grain of the elementary schools. It is there that the potential qualities of originality and genius which will later make their impress upon the course of industry and government must be quickened and given direction. More and more it is coming to be realized that to grasp without failure the complexities of modern life native intelligence no longer suffices.
Intelligence must be sharpened by education and given power by experience. The self-made man who achieved success untaught, unlettered, and unaided save by his own efforts of hand and brain, has become a legendary hero. Appreciation of changed conditions may be found in the records of increased attendance in the high schools. That increase has been at a greater rate than that of the population. In 1890 there were but 59 pupils for every ten thousand inhabitants; in 1895 there were 79; in 1900 there were 95; in 1910 there were 100; and now the number is considerably in excess, statistics for 1914 showing 117. Thus, in twenty-five years, the percentage of high school attendance has nearly doubled.
Again we find the school people without perception of the great value which a properly conducted library would bring to a high school. In his recently published book, "The New Education," Dr. Scott Nearing describes an up-to-date high school:
"The modern high school," he says, "is housed in a building which contains, in addition to the regular classrooms, gymnasiums, a swimming tank, physics and chemical laboratories; cooking, sewing, and millinery rooms; woodworking, forge, and machine shops; drawing rooms; a music room; a room devoted to arts and crafts; and an assembly room. This arrangement of rooms presupposes Mr. Gilbert's plan of making the high school, like the community, an aggregation of every sort of people, doing every sort of work."
When some of the foremost leaders in education leave out of a list of desiderata for the high school what the universities have come to regard as the very heart of the institution—the library—is there marvel that the love of literature is being strangled in the schools? Required reading of classics, and the use of literary masterpieces for classroom dissection has taken away the pure joy of reading and made the study of literature a mere literary autopsy. Here is the testimony of a teacher who places herself on the witness stand:[9]
"Sometimes the high school course works as a sort of vaccination to prevent their taking literature seriously.