More and more, in the instruction of adolescent and adult, the teacher's effort is being directed toward arousing a problem to be solved. Whether by a class lecture, by a class discussion, or by a personal conference, the pupil is brought to feel that it is important for him to find the answer. Is it not important, then, for the librarian to be skilled in drawing out a statement of the problem, or, changing the figure, to recognize accurately the symptoms and to prescribe unerringly? I think librarians having to do with high school and college students should rather frequently visit classes and attend lectures. If this were done, the pupil would less often be ground between upper and nether millstone, and the millstones would think more of each other.
Thus far, educational ideals and practices. Now will they help us any in attempting to formulate a library pedagogy? I believe they will. I believe that the teaching attitude, the study of the individual, the putting of the individual's needs far and away before the observance of inflexible rule and practice, and the determination to correlate people and books and life to the very ends of the earth,—these four stones at least will be in the foundation of library pedagogy.
I am not sure that all educational people will agree entirely with the foregoing statement of educational principles and methods. I am quite sure that I may as well gracefully hand my head now to some of you because of the following library corollaries of the preceding educational doctrines. Some of these are my own beliefs, some are beliefs of educational men regarding libraries:
In the training of librarians, would it be more in accord with modern pedagogy to have less lecturing, less practice work done in the this-is-the-only-way-to-do-it attitude, and to have more of the come-on-and-let's-find-out, the learn-by-doing laboratory spirit?
Educational administration is being remodeled, centralized. If library work is to be more and more educational, school men have said to me, why not make the public library an integral part of the city school system, and the state library and state library commission an arm of the state department of education? It is a terrible thought, but it will not drown by denying it.
When library work becomes educational through and through, and all library assistants are experts in psychology and human nature, the fines system will be a thing of the past.
Conservation of the individual means that it is better to have a book in use than to have it lying peacefully on the shelf entirely surrounded by unbroken rules.
Conservation of society means that it is better to have the library open on holidays and Sundays, when the working man isn't "dead tired," than to report an increased circulation of fiction.
The PRESIDENT: For an object lesson as to the strenuous life we go to Oyster Bay. For library buildings we go to East Ninety-first street, New York, or when he is in Europe we go to Skibo Castle. For information as to the latest inventions we go to the laboratory of Mr. Edison. For full information as to the best in high school work we go to the Girls' High School in Brooklyn. Miss MARY E. HALL.
Miss Hall spoke extemporaneously upon the enlarging scope of library work in high schools. Some of the points discussed were treated by her in a paper before the section on Library Work with Children at the Ottawa conference, 1912. See Ottawa Proceedings in Bulletin of the American Library Association, v. 6, p. 260-68.