Part 21

So with the librarians of yesterday and the day before. They are hard workers, not idlers. They have the tools, and they go through the motions. They may tire themselves out with their labor. Their library buildings may be attractive and clean; their technique perfect, their books well selected and in good order, their catalogs excellent. It is hard to point to any one thing that they are doing incorrectly or that they are omitting. And yet we must judge their work by its fruits; they are put into a community of actual or potential readers in charge of a collection of books. What are these for, if not to be read? Yet many remain untouched. For what purpose have the schools taught the townspeople to read? Thousands of them make no good use of that knowledge. To the librarian of to-day the non-realization of this and the lack of effort to remedy it mean failure. In order to make a little more definite our ideas of these three kinds of librarians, let us consider one or two very practical problems and see how each would probably view them and act upon them.

First. The library circulates no books on plumbing. For the librarian of the day before yesterday, this is no problem at all. Probably his library has no books on plumbing. His library is not for plumbers, and he has never suspected that it could be. As for the plumbers in his community, they too have never considered the possibility that they might learn something of their work from books in a public library. They are therefore silent and uncomplaining. Peace reigns and there is a general state of satisfaction all around--the satisfaction of blissful ignorance and of the day before yesterday.

The librarian of yesterday, on the other hand, sees the problem clearly and is concerned about it. He has good books on plumbing and nobody reads them. Evidently the more advanced grade of the librarian has not affected the plumbers--they still remain in ignorance of the public library. But what is he to do? Here is the library; here are the books; here is the librarian, ready and willing to distribute them to all who may come. If the generation--or any part of it--is so wicked and perverse that it comes not, what is there to do? What, indeed! And so library and community remain in the twilight of yesterday just before the dawn.

The librarian of to-day not only sees the problem and is concerned about it, but he proceeds to do something. Just what he does or how he does it is of far less consequence than the fact that he sees action in the matter to be necessary and possible. He may go personally and interview the plumbers; he may send them lists; he may get permission to address the plumbers’ union; he may do one or many of a thousand things to remedy matters, and although it is certain that what he does will not be completely effective, it is equally certain that it will have some good effect, which is the main thing.

Problem Second. Examination of the registry list shows that there are practically no card holders in a certain part of the town. As in the former case, this is no problem at all to the day before yesterday librarian. Its existence would in general not appear to him, certainly not as the result of any kind of statistical investigation. If he were informed of it he would regard the fact with complacency. The library is for readers, and if certain persons are non-readers they had better keep away. Nothing could be simpler. The librarian of yesterday, on the other hand, feels that all is not right. It is certainly too bad that when library privileges are offered free to all, so large a portion of the community should fail to take advantage of them. The library stands ready to help these people, if they will only come. Why don’t they?

The librarian of yesterday thus stops with a question; the librarian of to-day proceeds to answer it. He finds out why they don’t come. He may discover one or more of any number of things; whatever may be the causes, they are sure to be interesting, at least to him, for the to-day librarian is a born investigator. It may be that the non-readers are literate, but take no interest in books; perhaps they say they have no time to read; possibly the library has not the kind of books that they like; they may be foreigners, reading no English, and the library may have no books in their tongue. Whatever the trouble may be, the librarian of to-day sets about to remedy it. He may not succeed; but it is the diagnosis and the attempt at treatment, not its success, that constitute him what he is.

Problem Third. The reading done through the library is trivial and inconsequential. The fiction drawn is of low order, and there is little else read. The way in which this will affect the three types of librarian may be predicted at once. The librarian of the day-before-yesterday heeds it not; the librarian of yesterday heeds and perhaps worries, but does nothing. The librarian of to-day finds out the trouble and then tries to remedy it.

And so it goes: you may construct other problems for yourselves and imagine their solution, or lack of solution.

Now, it is obvious that there are great and evident objections to being a librarian of to-day and corresponding advantages in being one of the other kinds. In the first place the to-day variety of librarianship involves brainwork and it is always difficult to use one’s brain--we saw that in the case of the street-cleaner. Then this kind of librarian must be always looking for trouble. Instead of congratulating himself that all is going smoothly, he must set out with the premise that all cannot be going smoothly. There must be some way in which his books can be made to serve more people and serve them better; and it is his business to find out that way. Then the to-day librarian must use his statistics. The librarian of the day before yesterday probably takes none at all. The librarian of yesterday collects them with diligence, but regards any suggestion that they might be of use somewhat as the lazy wood-sawyer did the advice that he should sharpen his saw. “I should think I had a big enough job to cut up all this wood,” he replied petulantly, “without stopping to sharpen saws.” The librarian of yesterday has trouble enough in collecting and tabulating his statistics without stopping to use them--to make any deductions from them--to learn where the library machine is failing and where he should use the wrench or the oil can. All these things and many others make it easier for the overworked librarian to drop back into yesterday, or the day before. It should be borne in mind, however, that the difference between the three types of librarian is not so much difference in the amount of work done as it is in attitude of mind. The librarian of to-day does not necessarily expend more energy than the librarian of day before yesterday--but it is expended in a different direction and with a different object. It is to be feared that some librarians of small libraries allow themselves to become discouraged after reading of the great things that have been accomplished by large institutions with plenty of money to spend--the circulation of millions of books yearly, the purchase of additions by the tens of thousands, the provision of exhibitions for the children, the story-telling by professionals, the huge collections on special subjects, technology, art or history. It almost seems as if success were simply a matter of spending and as if without money to spend, failure should be expected as a matter of course.

On the contrary, all that the money does is to make possible success on a large and sensational scale--without the proper spirit and the proper workers the result might be failure on a scale quite as sensational. And an enthusiastic spirit, a high aim and unflagging energy--these are things that no money can buy and that will bring success on the small scale as on the large one.

We are fortunate--we who have charge of libraries and are trying to do something worth while with them--that there is perhaps less of the spirit of pure commercialism among us than among some other classes of workers. For this, in part, we have to thank our inadequate salaries. Persons who desire to work simply for the material reward will select some other field. We are glad to get our reward--we certainly earn it; but I venture to say that in the case of most of us there is also something in the work that appeals to us. And that something is the thing that, pushed to its furthest extent, will bring the dawn of to-day into the most backward library. It is not a very inspiring thing simply to sit down and watch a pile of books--hardly more so, I should think, than to take care of a pile of bricks or a load of turnips. Interest, enthusiasm, inspiration, come with realization of the fact that every one of those books has a mission and that it is the librarian’s business to find what it is and to see that it is performed. In the large, wealthy institution this duty may be accompanied by the expenditure of vast sums, and may be performed with the aid of things that only large sums of money can buy; in the small library there may be but a single librarian and only a few dollars to spend. But, just as in the case of a city librarian with an ample salary, she has open to her the choice of those three types of librarianship--the day before yesterday, yesterday and to-day.

And how about the librarian of to-morrow? Perhaps it may be as well to leave him or her for future consideration; but I cannot help saying just a word. May it not be that in the days to come we shall have enough civic pride to do whatever we may find to do--in our libraries or anywhere else, not with our eyes fixed only upon the work itself, important as that may be, but with the broader viewpoint of its effect upon the whole community? May it not be that this librarian of to-morrow will ask not, “Will it raise my circulation?” or even “Will it improve the quality of my reading?” but “Will it better the reading that is done in this community?” That librarian will not rejoice that his library circulation of good novels has dropped, when he realizes that twice as many bad novels are bought and read outside. He will be pleased that the children in his library have learned to wash their hands, but chiefly because he hopes that what they have learned may react upon the physical cleanliness--and perhaps on the moral cleanliness, too--of the community. Much as he will love the library, he will love it as an agency for the improvement of the community in which he lives and works, and he will do nothing for its aggrandizement, expansion or improvement that involves a change of the community in the opposite direction. We shall not see one library rejoicing because it has enticed away the users of some other library; we may even see a library rejoicing that it has lost its readers in Polish history, we will say, when it becomes known that they have gone to another library with a better collection in that subject.

I confess that I am looking forward to the day when we shall take this view--when the adage “Every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost” may be forgotten among institutions in the same town. The policy that it represents makes for high speed, perhaps, but not for solidarity. In a fight such as we are waging with the forces of ignorance and indifference we should all keep shoulder to shoulder. This is why the librarian should say: “I am a citizen; nothing in this city is without interest to me.” That is why he should be a librarian of to-day, and why he may even look forward with hopefulness to the dawn of a still better to-morrow.

SCHOOL LIBRARIES AND MENTAL TRAINING

Is it more important in education to impart definite items of information or to train the mind so that it will know how to acquire and wish to acquire? To ask the question is to answer it; yet we do not always live up to our lights.

In the older methods the teacher, or rather his predecessors, decided what it would be necessary for the child to memorize, and then he was made to memorize, while still without appreciation of the need of so doing. We are perhaps in danger today of going to the other extreme. We require so little memorization by the student that the memory, as a practical tool of everyday life, is in danger of falling into disuse. It is surely possible for us to exercise our pupils’ memories, to develop them, and to control them, without giving them the fatal idea that memory is a substitute for thought, or that the assimilation of others’ ideas, perfect though it may be, will altogether take the place of the development of one’s own. There are still things that one must learn by heart, but since they must be retained below the threshold of consciousness, it is well that if possible they should also be acquired below that threshold. The problem of consciously learning a quantity of items of any kind and then relegating them to one’s subconsciousness in such a way that they will be available at any given time is not, of course, impossible. Most of us have at our disposal many facts that we have learned in this way; but I venture to assert that most of us have lost a large proportion of what we thus acquired. Now a man never learns by rote the names of his relations, the positions of the rooms in his house, the names of the streets in his town. He has acquired them subconsciously as he needs them. When the human mind becomes convinced of the need of information of this kind “in its business,” the acquiring comes as a matter of course. In a language, the paradigms may be learned unconsciously when the pupil sees that they are necessary in order to understand an interesting passage; the multiplication table and tables of weights and measures require no conscious memorization; or at least such memorization may be undertaken voluntarily as a recognized means to a desired end. I say these things may be done; I am sure that they are in many schools; I am equally sure that they were unheard of in my own boyhood; that is, as recognized methods in teaching. Of course, in spite of schools and teachers and methods, a vast amount of information and training has always been acquired in this way. I do not remember ever “learning to read” as a set task. I am sure that none of my children ever did so. We recognized the desirability of knowing how. We wanted to learn, and so we learned; that is all. Of course our teachers and parents and friends helped us along.

Is not this what the school is for--to make the pupil anxious to learn and then to help him? When all schools are conducted on this principle, we shall be very happy, but apparently it is not so simple as it would appear.

What we should try to approximate, at all events, is an emancipation from the thraldom of unwillingness on the part of the pupil--to bring it about that he shall desire to learn and will take what measures he can to do so, gladly availing himself of what help we can offer him.

I have said that what we need is to stimulate the pupil’s desire and then to satisfy it. I have known teachers who were competent to do both--who could take an ignorant, unwilling pupil and make of him an enthusiast, thirsting for knowledge, in a few weeks. We all know of the ideal university whose faculty consisted of Mark Hopkins on one end of a log. I am sorry the creator of that epigram put his teacher on a log. There are plenty of logs, and, from this fact, too many persons, I am afraid, have leaped to the conclusion that there are also plenty of Mark Hopkinses. I fear that one trouble with educators is that, hitching their wagons to stars, they have assumed the possibility that terrestrial luminaries also are able to raise us to the skies. If we had a million Mark Hopkinses and a million boys for them to educate, we should need only a sufficient quantity of logs; we should be forever absolved from planning school-houses and making out schedules, from writing textbooks and establishing libraries. As it is, we must do all these things. We must adopt any and all devices to arouse and hold the pupil’s interest, and we must similarly seek out and use all kinds of machinery to satisfy that interest when once aroused. Of these devices and machines, the individual teacher, with or without his textbooks, lectures, recitations, laboratory work, and formal courses, is only one, and perhaps in some cases not the one to be preferred as the primary agent. Among such devices I believe that a collection of books, properly selected, disposed, and used can be made to play a very important part, both in arousing interest in a subject and in satisfying it--in other words in teaching it properly.

And first let us see what it may do to stimulate a general interest in knowledge. Of late I have seen cropping out here and there what seems to me a pedagogical heresy--the thesis that no kind of training is of value in fitting the pupil for anything but the definite object that it has in view. We can, according to this view, teach a boy to argue about triangles, but this will not help him in a legal or business discussion. We may teach him to solve equations, and he will then be an equation-solver--nothing else. We may teach him to read Greek and he will then be some sort of a Greek scholar, but his reaction to other attempts to teach him will not be affected. Anything like a general training is a contradiction in terms. If this is true, a great part of what I am saying is foolish, but I do not believe it. Doubtless we have exaggerated the effect of certain kinds of training. The old college graduate who, having been through four years of Latin, Greek, and mathematics, considered himself able with slight additional training, to undertake to practice law or medicine or manage a parish, was probably too sanguine. Yet I refuse to believe that a man’s brain is so shut off in knowledge-tight compartments that one may exercise one part of it without the slightest effect on the others. I cannot now write with my toes, but I am sure that I could learn to do so much more quickly because I know how to use my fingers for the purpose.

And it is indubitable, I think, that the best general preparation for mental activity of whatever kind is contact with the minds of others--early, late, and often. It tones up all one’s reactions--makes him mentally stronger, quicker, and more accurate. Some children get this at home, where there is a numerous family of persons who are both thoughtful and mentally alert. Some meet at home, besides members of the family, visitors who add to the variety of their contacts. Few get it in school, with much variety. And it is futile to expect most of our children to get it anywhere directly from persons. This being the case, it is wonderfully fortunate that we have so many of the recorded souls of human beings between the covers of books. With them mental contacts may be numerous, wide, and easy. To interest a man in a stretch of country take him up to a height whence he may overlook it. There is a patch of woods, there a hill, there is a winding stream. He will see in imagination the wild flowers under the trees, the windswept rocks behind the hill, the trout in the stream. He will wonder, too, what unimagined things there may be and he will long to find out. To interest a pupil in a subject turn him loose in a room containing a hundred books about it. He will browse about, finding a dozen things that he understands and a hundred that he does not. He will get such a bird’s-eye view that his stimulated imagination will long for closer acquaintance. And if you want to interest him in the world of ideas in general, turn him loose in a general library. The things that he will get are not to be ascertained by an examination. They are intangible, but their results are not.

In an illuminating article on the events just preceding the present European war, Professor Munroe Smith holds that it was precipitated chiefly by bringing to the front at every step military rather than diplomatic considerations. The trouble with military men, he says, is that they take no account of “imponderables”--by which he means public opinion, national feeling, injured pride, joy, grief--all those things, intellectual and emotional, that cannot be expressed in terms of men, guns, supplies, and military position. I have been wondering whether some other technically trained persons--educators, for instance, do not tend toward a similar neglect of imponderables, measuring educational values solely in terms of hours, and units, and the passing of examinations. It is a fault common to all highly trained specialists. The Scripture has a phrase for it, as for most things--“ye neglect the weightier matters of the law--judgment and faith.” These, you will note, are to be classed with Professor Munroe Smith’s “imponderables,” whereas mint, anise, and cummin are commercial products.

At least one noted educator, William James, did not make this error, for he bids us note that the emotional “imponderable”--though he does not use this word--possesses the priceless property of unlocking within us unsuspected stores of energy and placing them at our disposal. “I thank thee, Roderick, for the word,” says Fitz-James in “The Lady of the Lake”: “it nerves my heart; it steels my sword.” One would hardly expect to find educational psychology in Scott’s verse, but here it is. The word that Roderick Dhu spoke (I forget just what it was, but I think he called his rival a bad name) unlocked in Fitz-James an unexpected store of reserve energy, and the result, as I recall it, was quite unfortunate from the Gaelic point of view. We cannot afford to neglect the imponderables; and it is their presence and their influence that are fostered by a collection of books. If you will add together the weight of leather, paper, glue, thread, and ink in a book you will get the whole weight of the volume. There is naught ponderable left; and yet what is left is all that makes the thing a book--all that has power to influence the lives and souls of men--the imponderable part, fit for the unlocking of energies.

I would not have you think, although I believe this to be at bottom a matter of principles, that it is not possible to apply these principles very directly and concretely in the daily practice of an educational institution. I desire to call your attention for a moment to the testimony of one who has had great experience and practice in the administration of a collection of books in such an institution and in their use for the purposes already outlined--Mr. Frederick C. Hicks, assistant librarian of Columbia University, New York City, from whose recent review article on this subject I propose to quote a few paragraphs. Mr. Hicks is writing primarily of college instruction, but, as he notes in the first paragraph that I shall quote, what he says applies with equal cogency to the secondary school. He writes:

The general tendency in all instruction today, including even that in preparatory and high schools, is from what may be called the few-book method to the many-book method--a recognition of the power of the printed page for which librarians have always stood sponsor. The lecture, note-taking, text-book and quiz method of instruction is fast passing away in undergraduate as well as in graduate study. Textbooks are still in use in undergraduate and Master of Arts courses, but they have been relegated to a subordinate position. Emphasis is laid on work done and the assimilation of ideas gathered from many sources rather than upon memorizing the treatise of one author. Necessarily, references are chiefly to easily accessible works of secondary authority, and reading instead of research is the objective.

From the library point of view, the growth of the laboratory or case method of instruction appears to be an independent phenomenon. It should be noticed, however, that coincident with it is the general tendency to adopt a policy of teaching each subject with emphasis on its relations to other subjects.

Most universities now give courses for which no textbook is available. For instance, Professor Frederick J. Turner, of Harvard University, announces in a syllabus of 116 pages that there is no textbook suitable for use in his course on the History of the West in the United States. He thereupon gives citations to about 2,100 separate readings contained in 1,300 volumes, and says that his course requires not less than 120 pages of reading per week in these books. Professor James Harvey Robinson’s course in Columbia University on the History of the Intellectual Class in Western Europe has no textbook; and the reading for a class of 156 students is indicated in a pamphlet of 53 pages, containing references to 301 books. Illustrations could be taken from almost any subject in the university curriculum.

This is essentially a teacher’s view. Listen now to that of a public librarian, Mr. John Cotton Dana, of Newark, New Jersey. He says: