The new idea of education is that of social service, to train children to be not mere recipients, but distributors, not merely to increase their ability to care for themselves, but also their ability to care for others and for the state.
This perhaps sounds a note of the millennium, but we have been told to hitch our wagon to a star and although the star proves a restive steed and often lands us in the ditch, we travel further while the connection holds than we should in a long, continuous journey harnessed to a dependable but slow-going snail.
It may seem a far cry from these comments on education to the topic of my paper: How the library meets the changing conditions of child-life, but in reality it is only a step, for just as in philanthropy the emphasis is placed more and more upon prevention rather than remedy, so in education the task is coming to be the training of the good citizen rather than the correction of the bad citizen. And if the library is, as we are anxious to claim, an integral part of public education, it must have a share, however small, in the preventive policy of modern educators, which will in time effect a change in present social evils. Unless the library, as it meets these constantly changing conditions, can do something to improve them and to make the improvement stable, it has small claim to be included in the educational scheme of things.
In the conditions of child life which Miss Smith has outlined, the breaking up of the home is the most serious handicap which the children have to face. It is on this account that all social agencies working with children endeavor, so far as each is able, to supply an "illusory home" and to give, each in its own capacity, the training in various lines which ought in a normal home to come under the direction of the mother and father.
There is a spreading belief in the value of reading but there is a woeful lack of knowledge as to what should be read, and the children's library therefore fills a double rôle; it provides books which it would be impossible for many of the children to get otherwise, and it selects these books with thoughtful care of the special place each one has to fill, so that it becomes a counselor, not only to the children but to those parents who are anxious to assume their just responsibility in the guidance of their children's reading, and yet feel their inability to breast unaided the yearly torrent of children's books. The stimulation of this feeling of responsibility on the part of parents is one of the most effective means at the library's disposal of striking a blow at the root of the whole matter, for it is on the indifference of the parents that the blame for many juvenile transgressions should rest, which is now piled high upon the shoulders of the children.
In this connection mention should be made of the home library, the most social of all the library's activities. This small case of books, located in a home in the poorer quarters of a city and placed in charge of a paid or volunteer library assistant has been proved to be a potent force in the life of the neighborhood, for the "friendly visitor," if she be of the proper stuff, is not merely a circulator of books, she is an all-round good neighbor to whom come both children and mothers for help in their big and little problems, so that the results have proved to be "better family standards, greater individual intelligence, and more satisfactory neighborhood conditions."
But even granting that the mothers and fathers show a deep concern in what their children read, the connection between books and children is often left of necessity to the children's librarian who is selected with special reference to her adaptability to this particular kind of work. Now, no matter how strong a personality this young woman may possess, no matter how high her literary standards, nor how far-reaching her moral influence, it is obviously impossible for her to come in contact with more than a few of the children in her community. And in order to provide that intimacy with books from which we wish no child to be debarred, she must depend not alone upon her children's room, beautiful and homelike though that may be, but she must place her resources at the disposal of other educational agencies, all of which are working toward a common end. Of these the most powerful is the school, and through the lessons in the use of the public library, through the collections of books placed in the schoolrooms, and most of all through the influence of the teacher, the public library will touch the lives of thousands of children who might otherwise be in ignorance of its resources, and who through this contact will receive a vivid impression of their share as citizens in a great public institution. In this correlation of school and library care must be taken to place an equal emphasis upon the library as a place for recreation as well as a place for study.
Contrary to the teachings of our Puritan forefathers, we are growing more keenly alive to the imperative need of healthful recreation as a means of combating existing social conditions, and our great cities and our little villages are gradually making provision for the gratification of the desire of the people to play. Nowhere does the library find an alliance more satisfactory than with these play-centers, for it is in the union of the physical and mental development that education comes to its fullest fruition and the striving to instill "imagination in recreation" can find no better field than in these places where not only muscles but minds may be exercised.
These are the well-worn channels through which the children's library pours its stream of books into a thirsty land, channels into which run the tributary streams of deposit stations, churches, settlements, telegraph offices, newsboys' homes, and all the rest which it would only weary you to repeat.
We are constantly engaged in deepening and broadening these channels because we believe in the power of books to develop character and to broaden the vision of that "inward eye which is the bliss of solitude." Now the book that does this most effectively is the book behind which lies some personality. We all know the popularity of "the book Teacher says is good." But the problem of the children's librarian is not limited as is the teacher's to two or three dozen children. She must lay her plans to reach hundreds of children and she can do this only by dealing with the children in groups: in other words, in clubs, reading circles, and story-tellings.