The Library and Society: Reprints of Papers and Addresses

by Unknown

“From the total training during childhood there should result in the child a taste for interesting and improving reading, which should direct and inspire its subsequent intellectual life. That schooling which results in this taste for good reading, however unsystematic or eccentric the schooling may have been, has achieved a main end of elementary education; and that schooling which does not result in implanting this permanent taste has failed.... The uplifting of the democratic masses depends on this implanting at school of the taste for good reading.”

To persons who have given little thought to educational questions these utterances will have the weight that attaches to the highest authority; but we need no university president or national commissioner to tell us these facts. We have learned them from our own experience; and, enlightened as we now are, it seems to us strange that question could ever have been raised as to the essential character of the library in elementary education. Yet there are some of us, I am sure, who can recall painful consequences from putting into practice an educational theory not generally accepted by the pedagogues of our childhood days.

We know that higher education is impossible without a library, for the library is the storehouse of the world's knowledge, the record of humanity's achievements, the history of mankind's trials and sorrows and sufferings, of its victories and defeats and of its gradual progress upwards in spite of frequent fluctuation and failure. In this chronicle of the past lie lessons for the present and the future; from the lives of storied heroes comes the inspiration that leads the race onward and upward. A university without a library would of necessity have a very small and weak faculty—only the few professors who could be induced to go where the most important instrumentality of their work was lacking: the university that has an adequate library includes in its faculty the professors of all other universities and all the great teachers of all countries and ages.

But is it worth while to consider a university without a library? Can there be such an institution?

In higher education, then, the library is a necessity. In elementary and secondary education it is no less essential, if the most is to be made of the few years that the average child spends in school and if he is to be started on a path of self-culture. On this point Stanley Jevons says:

“In omitting that small expenditure in a universal system of libraries which would enable young men and women to keep up the three R's and continue their education, we spend £97 and stingily decline the £3 really needed to make the rest of the £100 effective.”

At the International Library Conference in London, in 1897, one of the most distinguished American librarians, who has been an administrator in a large educational field outside of the library, expressed his view of the supreme importance of the library in a scheme of popular education by saying that if he had to choose between the public school and the public library—if he could have only one—(though the alternative is one that never will or can be presented), he would keep the library and let the school go. For, he argued, every child would learn to read somehow; and, with a free library that actively sought him, he would be better off than if he had a school to teach him to read, but no books to read after he had learned. But however divergent might be opinions regarding this impossible alternative, there is no doubt that the public library, with enlarged functions and activities, has at least equal potentialities with the school. Whether the formal instruction of the school or the broader education of the library is of greater value, depends on what is the chief aim. If it is merely to make breadwinners, the school may be the more useful, though in this, too, the library is an efficient coadjutor; but if our purpose is to make men and women, citizens of a progressive nation, active members of an aspiring society, the library may fairly claim at least equal rank with the school. For the school wields its direct influence over the average child but a few years; the library is an active influence through life.

Again, more than ninety-five children out of every hundred leave school before they are sufficiently mature to comprehend those studies which open their eyes to the universe, which bear upon their relations to their fellow-men, upon their duties as citizens of a state, as members of organized society. These are the studies that deal with the most important problems that mankind has to solve. They cannot be taught to children; they cannot be taught—dogmatically—at all. They involve the consideration of burning questions, subjects of bitter controversy—the world-old battle between conservatism and innovation which, as Emerson says, “is the subject of civil history.” They cannot be taught by any teacher, they cannot be taught by any text-book or by any one book. Their adequate consideration calls for the reading of many books—books of the present and the future as well as the past. The electrician who allows himself to be guided by the treatises of twenty years ago would have no standing; neither has the economist or sociologist who has not kept up with the literature of the last thirty years—or the last three years. It would be of no particular advantage for all of us to be electricians. We can safely trust that field to experts; but it is extremely desirable that every man should comprehend the great issues of economics and politics. The school cannot even present the important problems of sociology; the university cannot adequately do so without the library. On no other subject is the wide reading that Matthew Arnold enjoins so necessary. And no other subject is of such momentous importance to mankind; for the betterment of social conditions is a necessary forerunner and foundation of moral and religious progress. And that cannot be true religion which does not lead to social betterment. In that noblest aspiration ever put into the mouth and mind and heart (too often, alas, only the mouth!) of man we are taught to pray not that we may be transplanted to a better world, but that God's kingdom may come and His will be done in this world.

We are not likely to abate our eagerness in the pursuit of knowledge of physical science, for the zeal of the scientist is stimulated by the spur of commercialism; and, though it seems impossible, the twentieth century may bring forth as wonderful discoveries and inventions as the nineteenth. But, to take the advance just now most sought, can any one raise the question as to which would be of greater benefit to St. Louis, to reach Chicago in an hour by airship or to take six or ten hours for the trip and find there—and everywhere—a contented body of workmen supplying us with the necessities of life and a set of managers carrying on the transportation system that we already have on equal terms to all people? What the world's progress most needs is “evening up.” The advancing column presents a very ragged front, with physical science and its applications so far ahead that they have almost lost sight of social science in the rear. It would be no great disadvantage to the world—to the progress of mankind as a whole—if the swift-footed legion of applied science would merely mark time for a period, while attention should be given to a better organization of the vast human army. The objective point would be reached as soon, for a nation is like a railway train; it can go no faster than its hindmost car. But this is not likely to happen at present. Applied science has every stimulus from within and without, every reward intrinsic and extrinsic; while progress in the social and political sciences must carry the dead weight of the inertia of conservatism and also meet the active and intense opposition of vested interests, which have ever the single purpose of preserving the status quo, no matter how unjust or maleficent.