Reading: How to Teach It

by Sarah Louise Arnold

What a silence in those old books, as of a half-peopled world; what bleating of flocks, what green pastoral rest, what indubitable human existence! Across brawling centuries of blood and war I hear the bleating of Abraham’s flocks, the tinkling of the bells of Rebekah’s camels.

Oh, men and women, so far separated yet so near, so strange yet so well known, by what miraculous power do I know you all? Books are the true Elysian fields where the spirits of the dead converse, and into these fields a mortal may venture unappalled. What king’s court can boast such company? What school of philosophy such wisdom?

There is Pan’s pipe; there are the songs of Apollo. Seated in my library at night, and looking on the silent faces of my books, I am occasionally visited by a strange sense of the supernatural. They are not collections of printed pages; they are ghosts. I take one down, and it speaks with me in a tongue not now heard on earth, and of men and things of which it alone possesses the knowledge.

I call myself a solitary, but sometimes I think I misapply the term. No man sees more company than I do. I travel with mightier cohorts around me than ever did Timour or Genghis Khan on their fiery marches. I am a sovereign in my library; but it is the dead, not the living, that attend my levees.

—Alexander Smith.

The Free Public Library is often termed the People’s College. It is established by communities that believe education to be the foundation of civic freedom as well as an element in human happiness. By taxation of the people these treasures of books are made free to all: the richest and the poorest alike. Here one’s scanty library is reënforced by full and rare collections, and the entire care of the custodians is to make this treasure-house useful to all comers.

But the reports of the librarians, encouraging though they be, do not describe a state of general reading. A study of these reports will reveal the fact that only a small part of the ought-to-be reading public finds its way to the library and uses this marvellous opportunity.

If we question why the readers are so few, we shall doubtless arrive at certain conclusions. Aside from the duties and necessities which debar many would-be readers from using the library, we shall conclude that the majority of persons not illiterate who fail to avail themselves of this opportunity have not learned to love books; while many others who have had considerable reading in school or at home have not learned how to make the stores of the library available.

Enough has been said, perhaps, regarding the necessity of teaching children to love books, to the end that they may have wholesome interests and simple and natural pleasures. Books reveal the experience of others, and yield to us the companionship of the wise and good. Sympathetic observation of the lives of boys and girls who have not been trained to this larger interest would drive us to renewed endeavors to open wide the doors to them, out of and away from the temptations which allure them to lower loves. The life that does not know how to find pleasure in a book, that turns to the saloon rather than to the library, is sad indeed. We cannot urge too strongly the early and continual teaching whose object is to make the children book-lovers.

But, if the young book-lover appears at the library door and fails to find the clue to the labyrinth where the words which he desires may be found, he may wander away again, never to return. If his love is strong, and the custodian learns his need, he may study his way into the desired paths; but it is evident to all readers that the library is most available to the best prepared, and that the vast treasures of even the free library are worthless to the ignorant. Further, we can but recognize that home reading and school reading do not always qualify the reader for study in a library. He must be taught how to use it, and somebody must teach him.