Children's books and reading

by Montrose Jonas Moses

I count life just a stuff

To try the soul’s strength on, educe the man.

The man of culture is something more than an upstart; his is a slow but a steady growth; the smallest star that burns into the night is one whose rays have taken years to reach the earth. Out of the varied but unified elements, the personality evolves its view of life; it may not necessarily be a life among books; Shakespeare the man and Shakespeare the poet are contradictions. The sustaining force in literature is no protector in the sense that it shields us from some impending danger. It settles behind us, pushes us, heart and soul, with a burning resolution, through the darkest night. The cultured man finds himself clinging to the sunnier side of doubt, not because Tennyson advises it, but because it has become part of his philosophy; he falls back upon a part of himself developed by literature.

Our neighbour is but a composite picture of numberless developments, all working toward a definite goal. We call him the cultured man. Our neighbour is one who tries to show us as many pictures of himself, working in different directions, as he thinks will clothe him in a mist of thought. We call him the dilettante. Dilettanteism does not sustain; we either have to be perfectly honest with ourselves, or else be discovered by others in the end.

The habit of association with good books is, therefore, one which our school systems need to inculcate. The supervisor of class-room libraries should strive to supplement the text-book with something that is not a text-book; the outlines of history should be strengthened by bona fide biography instead of by the hybrid type of fiction. A committee in Germany, after working some years over the recommendations of books for children, finally printed a list of 637 volumes—calling attention to a weakness in travel, popular science, and biography. This condition is as true in England and America; and one of the causes for the deficiency may be accounted for by the substitution of the text-book style for the dignified narrative. The writer of juvenile books, other than fiction, has not realised, up to the present time, that the direct treatment is capable of being understood by young people.

Conscious of this weakness, the librarian in time will banish from the circulating shelves the text-book, per se; and the school child should be prepared to meet the change. If he is given instruction in the uses of a dictionary,[54] and of a card catalogue; if he is trained by degrees to hunt up references—he should as well be familiarized with the transition from text-book to authority, from selection to source, from part to whole. From the mere usefulness of books he should be taught the attractive power of books. This, it would seem, is one of the fundamental relations existing between the library and the school.

With the increase of facilities, with the specialised consideration paid to children’s reading by librarian and by teacher, there arises the factor of the parent in connection with the two. What part, in the general plan, does the home occupy? It furnishes the scholar; it furnishes the reader. In private instruction, it may dictate what shall be taught to the boy or girl; in public instruction, the individual becomes part of the system. The home may purchase books for the particular taste of this child or of that, but the public library must attend to all demands. Because of its democratic mission, it partially discourages the private ownership of books by the average person. Therefore, in most essentials, the State furnishes the means of instruction and indicates what that instruction shall be in its elementary stages; the State likewise supports the library, a repository where the regulation and censorship are minimised as far as the reader is concerned.

Let us acknowledge the peculiar social and economic conditions that conduce to deprive the home of the means or of the time to give to the proper training of children: the crowded tenement, the isolated mountain cabin are alike in this denial. But the school and the library are counteracting the deficiency. The mental condition in the tenement is more in a state of ferment than in the mountains; the second generation of the ignorant emigrant in New York or Chicago or Cleveland or Pittsburg is far more fortunate than the new generation peopling our Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia. Yet the school and the library are penetrating the dense maze—they are defying isolation, and we will doubtless discover, before long, that the stagnation throughout the Tennessee ranges, and bordering the northern line of the Shenandoah Valley, has beneath it a great potential future of intellectual development. Until the social settlement passes through its experimental stage,—perhaps its very existence is dependent upon its experimental character—it were not safe to speculate on how largely it will aid in making the home so far independent of consuming necessity that it will respect the refinements of life, and will recognise that, in so doing, each individual raises his own self-respect. Should the settlement accomplish this, however little, it will justify its existence.

The home, none the less, remains a factor, and its responsibility is none the less urgent. The story hour is one of its legacies from the past, and through it, the parent should cater wisely to a child’s desire for a tale. If the library is also adopting the same means, this in no way should relieve the parent of the prerogative; it should only afford her an opportunity of improving upon her own idea as to how a story should be told. Home influence should direct this juvenile desire, this individual taste; for no one has the close knowledge of a boy or girl possessed by the father or mother.

The habit of good reading, mentioned before, should be the joint product of the library, the school, and the home. Yet, in many instances, the library card of the child is of small consideration to the parent. This is more likely due to indifference than to an absolute confidence in the library’s effort to bring juvenile readers in contact with the best books. The woman’s club that will study the problem of children’s reading, as sedulously as it analyses the pathologic significance of Ibsen’s heroines, will be rendering a service to the library, as well as fitting its members to pass some judgment on the publisher’s yearly output of juvenile books.