Sincerely yours,
WINSTON CHURCHILL.
Bureau of Education,
Washington, D. C.
April 29, 1913.
The public libraries have no better opportunity for effective service than that offered through generous and intelligent co-operation with the public schools and especially with the high schools and the highest grades of the grammar schools. Ideas and ideals gained through reading in childhood and youth effect the character more fundamentally and more permanently, and determine moral conduct for a longer time than ideas and ideals gained later. It should also be remembered that children have more time to read than men and women immersed in the strong current of adult life.
The public library in every city and town should be open on the freest terms to all school children and they should feel that they have the heartiest welcome to it. Not only should the teacher encourage children to use the library; librarians should invite them to do so and make all possible preparations to serve them. There should be in the libraries a sufficient number of reading rooms to accommodate children of different grades. In these should be assistant librarians who know the very best in literature for children and youth and who know also how to deal with children and how to make the rooms attractive. It is all important that the reading rooms and those in charge be attractive, respected, liked, and loved. It is especially important that children be led to read those things that have permanent and eternal value. No one should be permitted to direct the reading of children who thinks it necessary to have books written down to them or who does not know that the greatest books are the simplest and the most wholesome. The children's librarians should also be whole minded and whole hearted people with a broad and interesting knowledge of the world and life. It will be fatal if they are narrow, prejudiced, sectarian, or over-provincial.
The public library should have the services of one or more good story tellers who know the best stories of the world and can tell them in an interesting way. As often as once a week at least there should be a separate hour for all the children. The children should, of course, come in sections—primary, grammar grades, and high school.
In addition to the services rendered as here suggested at the library, all the children in school or out should have library cards and for the convenience of the children every school building should be made a branch library for the use of children at least. I see no reason why it should not also serve as a branch library for the older people. It would not cost much to have some one or more teachers at each school serve as librarians under the direction of the librarian of the central library. Through the branch library at the school many parents and other older members of the family could be reached who never can be reached through the ordinary central and branch library buildings. Attractive statements about books, especially new books should be sent to the parents by the children and books might be ordered and returned through the children. It would not be difficult to induce pupils and teachers to arrange reading circles and clubs among the adult members of families living near the school, the books used by the reading circles to be ordered from and returned to the school branch library. Teachers and principals would also be willing to arrange for weekly meetings for the members of these reading circles and clubs, the meetings to be held at the school. Certificates and diplomas might be given for the reading of certain groups of books.
The library should own in sets books helpful to teachers and children in their studies and should, at the request of superintendents and principals, place sets of these in the several schools for use in school, but not to be taken out except over night or over Saturdays and Sundays and holidays.
Libraries should also own large collections of illustrative pictures and lantern slides. These should be cataloged as books are and lists of them should be in the hands of school superintendents, supervisors, principals, and teachers. The pictures and slides should be loaned the schools freely upon their request. School officers and teachers should be asked to assist in selecting these and all other collections for the use of children.