And Prof. Münsterberg thrusts his finger into what I believe to be the weakest joint in our educational armor when he says: "... as there is indeed a difference whether I ask what may best suit the taste and liking of Peter, the darling, or whether I ask what Peter, the man, will need for the battle of life in which nobody asks what he likes, but where the question is how he is liked, and how he suits the taste of his neighbors."
What would become of our civilization if we were to follow merely the instincts and natural desires? Yet is there not in America a tremendous tendency to the notion, that except in matters of physical welfare, the child's lead is to be followed to extreme limits? Don't we librarians feel it in the pressure brought to bear upon us by those who fail to find certain stories, wanted by the children, on our shelves? "Why, that's a good book," the parent will say, "The hero is honest and kind, the book won't hurt him any—in fact it will give the child some good ideas."
"Ideas." Yes, perhaps. There is another educator I should like to quote, J. H. Baker in his "Education and life": "Whatever you would wish the child to do and become, that let him practice. We learn to do, not by knowing, but by knowing and then doing. Ethical teaching, tales of heroic deeds, soul-stirring fiction that awakens sympathetic emotions may accomplish but little unless in the child's early life ... the ideas and feelings find expression in action and so become a part of the child's power and tendency...."
Now we believe with G. Stanley Hall that, "The chief enemy of active virtue in the world is not vice but laziness, languor and apathy of will;" that "mind work is infinitely harder than physical toil;" that (as another says) "all that does not rouse, does not set him to work, rusts and taints him ... the disease of laziness ... destroys the whole man."
And when children of good heritage, good homes, sound bodies, bright minds, spend hours every week curled up among cushions, allowing a stream of cambric-tea literature gently to trickle over their brain surfaces, we know that though the heroes and heroines of these stories be represented as prodigies of industry and vigor, our young swallowers of the same are being reduced to a pulp of brain and will laziness that will not only make them incapable of struggling with a page of Quentin Durward, for example, but will affect their moral stamina, since fighting fiber is the price of virtue.
Ours is, as I have said, a public education, a republic's problem. To quote President Wilson again: "Our present plans for teaching everybody involve certain unpleasant things quite inevitably. It is obvious that you cannot have universal education without restricting your teaching to such things as can be universally understood. It is plain that you cannot impart 'university methods' to thousands, or create 'investigators' by the score, unless you confine your university education to matters which dull men can investigate, your laboratory training to tasks which mere plodding diligence and submissive patience can compass. Yet, if you do so limit and constrain what you teach, you thrust taste and insight and delicacy of perception out of the schools, exalt the obvious and merely useful things above the things which are only imaginatively or spiritually conceived, make education an affair of tasting and handling and smelling, and so create Philistia, that country in which they speak of 'mere literature.'"
In our zeal to serve the little alien, descendant of generations of poverty and ignorance, let us not lose sight of the importance to our country of the child more fortunate in birth and brains. So strong is my feeling on the value of leaders that I hold we should give at least as much study to the training of the accelerate child as we give to that of the defective. Though I boast the land of Abraham Lincoln and Booker Washington I do not give up one iota of my belief that the child who is born into a happy environment, of parents strong in body and mind, holds the best possibilities of making a valuable citizen; and so I am concerned that this child be not spoiled in the making by a training or lack of training that fails to recognize his possibilities.
It is encouraging to find growing attention in the "Proceedings" of the N. E. A. and other educational bodies to the problem of the bright child who has suffered by the lock-step system which has molded all into conformity with the capabilities of the average child.
The librarian's difficulty is perhaps greater than that of the teacher, because open shelves and freedom of choice are so essential a part of our program. We must provide easy reading for thousands of children. Milk and water stories may have an actual value to children whose unfavorable heritage and environment have retarded their mental development. But the deplorable thing is to see young people, mercifully saved from the above handicaps, making a bee line for the current diluted literature for grown-ups, (as accessible as Scott on our open shelves) and to realize that this taste, which is getting a life set, is the inevitable outcome of the habit of reading mediocre juveniles.
We must not rail at publishers for trying to meet the demands of purchasers. Our job is to influence that demand far more than we have done as yet. Large book jobbers tell us that millions and millions of poor juveniles are sold in America to thousands of the sort we librarians recommend. I have seen purchase lists of boys' club directors and Sunday School library committees calling for just the weak and empty stuff we would destroy. I have unwittingly been an eavesdropper at Christmas book counters and have heard the orders given by parents and the suggestions made by clerks. And I feel that the public library has but skirmished along the outposts while the great field of influencing the reading of American children remains unconquered. Until we affect production to the extent that the book stores circulate as good books as the best libraries we cannot be too complacent about our position as a force in citizen making.