Miss Power then gave the chair to Miss Mary E. Hall, librarian Girls' high school, Brooklyn, N. Y. Miss Hall introduced Miss MAUDE McCLELLAND, who told of her work in charge of the library in a high school in Passaic, N. J., pronounced by Miss Hall to be a model of its kind. Miss McClelland made a very happy comparison of the old time school boy and the school boy of today and discussed modern high school methods of helping children to meet actual problems in life.
Miss McClelland said in part:
THE WORK OF A HIGH SCHOOL BRANCH
In the preface to a volume of essays entitled "Literature and life," William Dean Howells defends the doctrine that the tree of knowledge, so familiar to all of us, is in reality but a branch of the tree of life. Literature, instead of having a separate existence of its own, is, as a matter of fact, but a part of life, and all that is necessary to make it a vital force in the lives of human beings is to establish its identity with life.
Now the emphasizing of this unity of literature and life has become the self-appointed task of the modern public library—a task which it is approaching from a number of different angles, such as work with children, work with clubs, work with foreigners, and work with schools. Something of what the library is doing along one of these lines—that of work with schools—may be learned by studying the methods in use in the high school branch of a public library.
Perhaps these methods may best be illustrated by contrasting the school days of two brothers, Adam and Theodore. Now Adam went to school in the good old days when there were no high school libraries, and indeed very few libraries of any kind. At 9 o'clock every morning the active interests of life ceased for him. He then entered the schoolhouse and began the study of a set of lessons, which far removed from real life in themselves, could not be made intensely vital even by the best of teachers, because there was no library in the building upon which the teachers could draw for books and other materials to illustrate the connection between the classics and real life.
The first subject upon his program was ancient history. This he learned with the aid of a textbook, condensed in form, and attenuated in spirit. To him the book was a collection of disagreeable facts to be learned by heart and then forgotten as quickly as possible after examinations were over.
Now, when Adam's brother Theodore entered the school, matters had changed. A branch of the public library had been installed, and the history teacher was no longer handicapped in her work. The members of Theodore's class had all been given special topics for investigation, so when the class in ancient history was called, one pupil drew upon the board the plan of a Greek house, which he had copied from Harper's classical dictionary, while another pupil, who had been to the library and interviewed Gulick's "Life of the ancient Greeks," described the furniture and cooking utensils of the Greeks, and told about the kind of things they had to eat. And Theodore began to realize that after all, those ancient Greeks were real people, just like other real people. So from that history lesson he carried away inspiration from the life of the past toward the living of his own life of the present and future.
The next lesson on the schedule for the day was English. Now, when Adam went to school, he had been rather fond of reading—but that there could be any connection between reading and the English work given him at school never entered his head for a moment. True, they did some reading in the English class, but it was reading in which he wasn't very much interested, though he supposed that in some vague way it probably did him a great deal of good. The real reading, which he did surreptitiously at home was of an entirely different kind. Far from imagining that he derived any benefit from it, he at times even feared that he was endangering his immortal soul. But he felt that the pleasure was worth it. The two kinds of reading, if tabulated, would be about as follows, the comparative amount done being in about the ratio of 16 to 1 in favor of the kind he liked—if he had luck in borrowing books from the boys:
School Reading