Library Work with Children Part 11

I shall be much surprised if we do not learn this fall that the world has been deceived in supposing that to Amundsen and Scott belong the honor of finding the South Pole, or to Gen. Goethals the credit of engineering the Panama Ca.n.a.l. If we do not discover that some young Frank or Jack or Bill was the brains behind these achievements, I shall wonder what has become of the ingenuity of the plotter of the series stories--the "plotter" I say advisedly, for it is a known fact that many of these stories are first outlined by a writer whose name makes books sell, the outlines then being filled in by a company of underlings who literally write to order. When we learn, also, that an author who writes admirable stories, in which special emphasis is laid upon fair play and a sense of honor, is at the same time writing under another name books he is ashamed to acknowledge, we are not surprised at the low grade of the resulting stories.

With the above extremes of good and poor there will be quant.i.ties on the border line, books not distinctly harmful from one standpoint--in fact, they will busily preach honesty and pluck and refinement, etc., but they will be so lacking in imagination and power, in the positive qualities that go to make a fine book, that they cannot be called wholly harmless, since that which crowds out a better thing is harmful, at least to the extent that it usurps the room of the good.

These books we will be urged to buy in large duplicate, and when we, holding to the ideal of the library as an educational force, refuse to supply this intellectual pap, well-to-do parents may be counted upon to present the same in quant.i.ties sufficient to weaken the mental digestion of their offspring beyond cure by teachers the most gifted.

There are two princ.i.p.al arguments--so-called--hurled at every librarian who tries to maintain a high standard of book selection. One is the "I read them when I was a child and they did me no harm" claim; the other, based upon the doggedly clung- to notion that our ideal of manhood is a grown-up Fauntleroy, infers that every book rejected was offensive to the children's librarian because of qualities dangerously likely to encourage the boy in a taste for bloodshed and dirty hands.

Now, in this day when parents are frantically protecting their children from the deadly house fly, the mosquito, the common drinking cup and towel; when milk must be sterilized and water boiled and adenoids removed; when the young father solemnly bows to the dictum that he mustn't rock nor trot his own baby-- isn't it really matter for the joke column to hear the "did me no harm"

idea advanced as an argument? And yet it is so offered by the same individual who, though he has survived a boyhood of mosquito bites and school drinking cups, refuses to allow his child to risk what he now knows to be a possible carrier of disease.

The "what was good enough for me is good enough for my children"

idea, if soberly treated as an argument in other matters of life, would mean death to all progress, and it is no more to be treated seriously as a reason for buying poor juvenile books than a contention for the fetich doctor versus the modern surgeon, or for the return to the foot messenger in place of electrical communication.

It would be tactless, if not positively dangerous, if we children's librarians openly expressed our views when certain people point boastfully to themselves as shining products of mediocre story book childhoods. So I would hastily suppress this thought, and instead remind these people that, as a vigorous child is immune from disease germs which attack a delicate one, so unquestionably have thousands of mental and moral weaklings been r.e.t.a.r.ded from their best development by books that left no mark on healthy children. In spite of the probability that there are to-day alive many able-bodied men who cut their first teeth on pickles and pork chops, we do not question society's duty to disseminate proper ideas on the care and feeding of children.

Isn't it about time that we nailed down the lid of the coffin on the "did me no harm" argument and buried the same in the depths of the sea?

Another notion that dies hard is one a.s.suming that, since the children's librarian is a woman, p.r.o.ne to turn white about the gills at the sight of blood--or a mouse--she can not possibly enter into the feelings of the ancestral barbarian surviving in the young human breast, but must try to hasten the child's development to twentieth century civilization by eliminating the elemental and savage from his story books.

If those who grow hoa.r.s.e shouting the above would take the trouble to examine the lists of an up-to-date library they might blush for their shallowness, that they have been basing their opinions on their memory of library lists at least twenty-five years old.

We do not believe that womanly women and manly men are most successfully made by way of silly, shoddy, sorry-for-themselves girlhoods, or lying, swaggering, loafing boyhoods; and it is the empty, the vulgar, the cheap, smart, trust-to-luck story, rather than the gory one, that we dislike.

I am coming to the statement of what I believe to be the problem most demanding our study today. It is, briefly, the problem of the mediocre book, its enormous and ever-increasing volume. More fully stated it is the problem of the negatively as the enemy of the positively good; of the cultivation of brain laziness by "thoughts-made-easy" reading. It is a republic's, a public school problem, viz.: How is it possible to raise to a higher average the lowest, without reducing to a dead level of mediocrity the citizens of superior possibilities? Our relation to publisher and parent, to the library's adult open shelves of current fiction enter into the problem. The children's over-reading, and their reluctance to "graduate" from juvenile books, these and many other perplexing questions grow out of the main one.

I said awhile ago that the new education has had a tendency to make life too soft for children, and to give to their parents the belief that natural instincts alone are safe guides to follow in rearing a child. I hope I shall not seem to be a good old times croaker, sighing for the days when school gardens and folk dancing and glee clubs and dramatization of lessons and beautiful text-books and fascinating handicraft and a hundred other delightful things were undreamed-of ways of making pleasant the paths of learning. Heaven forbid that I should join the ranks of those who carp at a body of citizens who, at an average wage in America less than that of the coal miner and the factory worker, have produced in their schools results little short of the miraculous. To visit, as I have, cla.s.srooms of children born in slums across the sea, transplanted to tenements in New York, and to see what our public school teachers are making of these children--the backward, the underfed, the "incorrigible," the blind, the anaemic--well, all I can say is, I do not recommend these visits to Americans of the stripe of that boastful citizen who, being shown the crater of Vesuvius with a "There, you haven't anything like that in America!" disdainfully replied, "Naw, but we've got Niagara, and that'd put the whole blame thing out!" For myself I never feel quite so disposed to brag of my Americanism as when I visit some of our New York schools.

And yet, watching the bored shrug of the bright, well-born high school child when one suggests that "The prince and the pauper"

is quite as interesting a story as the seventh volume of her latest series, a librarian has some feelings about the lines-of- least-resistance method of educating our youth, which she is glad to find voiced by some of our ablest thinkers.

Here is what J. P. Munroe says: "Many of the new methods . . .

methods of gentle cooing toward the child's inclinations, of timidly placing a chair for him before a disordered banquet of heterogeneous studies, may produce ladylike persons, but they will not produce men. And when these modern methods go as far as to compel the teacher to divide this intellectual cake and pudding into convenient morsels and to spoon-feed them to the child, partly in obedience to his schoolboy cravings, partly in conformity to a pedagogical psychology, then the result is sure to be mental and moral dyspepsia in a race of milk-sops." How aptly "spoon-fed pudding" characterizes whole cartloads of our current "juveniles"!

Listen to President Wilson's opinion: "To be carried along by somebody's suggestions from the time you begin until the time when you are thrust groping and helpless into the world, is the very negation of education. By the nursing process, by the coddling process you are sapping a race; and only loss can possibly result except upon the part of individuals here and there who are so intrinsically strong that you cannot spoil them."

Hugo Munsterberg is a keen observer of the product of American schools, and contrasting their methods with those of his boyhood he says: "My school work was not adjusted to botany at nine years because I played with an herbarium, and at twelve to physics because I indulged in noises with home-made electric bells, and at fifteen to Arabic, an elective which I miss still in several high schools, even in Brookline and Roxbury. The more my friends and I wandered afield with our little superficial interests and talents and pa.s.sions, the more was the straight-forward earnestness of the school our blessing; and all that beautified and enriched our youth, and gave to it freshness and liveliness, would have turned out to be our ruin, if our elders had taken it seriously, and had formed a life's program out of petty caprices and boyish inclinations."

And Prof. Munsterberg 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 n.o.body 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 compa.s.s. 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 kind 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 r.e.t.a.r.ded 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.

An "impossible" ideal, of course, but far from intimidating, the largeness of the task makes us all the more determined.

This paper attempts no suggestion of new methods of attacking the problem. It is rather a restatement of an old perplexity. I harp once more on a worn theme because I think that unless we frequently lift our eyes from the day's absorbing duties for a look over the whole field, and unless we once and again make searching inventory of our convictions, our purposes, our methods, our attainments, we are in danger of letting ourselves slip along the groove of the taken-for-granted and our work loses in power as we allow ourselves to become leaners instead of leaders. May we not, as if it were a new idea, rouse to the seriousness of the mediocre habit indulged in by young people capable of better things? Should not our work with children reach out more to work with adults, to those who buy and sell and make books for the young? Is it not time for the successful teller of stories to children to use her gifts in audiences of grown people, persuading these molders of the children's future of the reasonableness of our objection to the third rate since it is the enemy of the best? May it not be politic, at least, for the librarian to descend from her disdainful height and make friends with "the trade," with bookseller and publisher who, after all, have as good a right to their bread and b.u.t.ter as the librarian paid out of the city's taxes?

And then--is it not possible that we might be better librarians if we refused to be librarians every hour in the day and half the night as well? What if we were to have the courage to refuse to indulge in nervous breakdowns, because we deliberately plan to play, and to eat, and to sleep, to keep serene and sane and human, believing that G.o.d in His Heaven gives His children a world of beauty to enjoy as well as a work to do with zeal. If we lived a little longer and not quite so wide, the gain to our chosen work in calm nerves and breadth of interest and sympathy would even up for dropping work on schedule time for a symphony concert or a country walk or a visit with a friend--might even justify saving the cost of several A. L. A. conferences toward a trip to Italy!

This hurling at librarians advice to play more and work less reminds me of a story told by a southern friend. Years ago, in a sleepy little Virginia village, there lived two characters familiar to the townspeople, whose greatest daily excitement was a stroll down to the railroad station to watch the noon express rush through to distant southern cities. One of these personages was the station keeper, of dry humor and sententious habit, whom we will call Hen Waters; the other was the station goat, named, of course, Billy. Year after year had Billy peacefully cropped the gra.s.s along the railroad tracks, turning an indifferent ear to the roar of the daily express, when suddenly one day the notion seemed to strike his goatish mind that this racket had been quietly endured long enough. With the warning whistle of the approaching engine, Billy, lowering his head, darted furiously up the track, intending to b.u.t.t the offending thunderer into Kingdom Come. When, a few seconds later, the amazed spectators were gazing after the diminishing train, Hen Waters, addressing the spot where the redoubtable goat had last been seen, drawled out: "Billy, I admire your pluck--but darn your discretion!"

The parallel between the the ambitions and the futility of the goat, and the present speaker's late advice is so obvious that only the illogicalness of woman can account for my cherishing a hope that I may be spared the fate of the indiscreet Billy.

VALUES IN LIBRARY WORK WITH CHILDREN

This second paper on Values in library work with children, was presented at the Kaaterskill Conference of the A. L. A. in 1913 by Caroline Burnite. In it are discussed "departmental organization as it benefits the reading child, and the principles and policies which have developed through departmental unity."

For inclusion in this volume it has been somewhat condensed by the author.

Caroline Burnite was born in Caroline County, Maryland, in 1875; was graduated from the Easton, Maryland, High School in 1892 and from Pratt Inst.i.tute Library School in 1894. From 1895 to 1901 she was librarian of the Tome Inst.i.tute in Port Deposit, Maryland. She was an a.s.sistant in the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh from 1902 to 1904, when she became Director of Children's Work in the Cleveland Public Library, the position she now holds. Miss Burnite is also an instructor in the Western Reserve Library School.

To elucidate principles of value, I shall use, by way of ill.u.s.tration, the experience and structure of a children's department where the problem of children's reading and the means of bringing books to them has been intensively studied for some nine years.... Probably about six out of ten of the children of that city read library books in their homes during the year, and each child reads about twenty books on the average. In all, fifty- four thousand children read a million books, which reach them through forty-three librarians a.s.signed for special work with these children, through three hundred teachers and about one hundred volunteers.

Now, we know that six out of ten children is not an ideal proportion of the total number. We know also, inversely, that the volume of work entailed in serving fifty-four thousand children may endanger the quality of book service given to each child.

Both of these conditions show that the experience of each reading child should make its own peculiar contribution to the general problem of children's reading and that the experience of large numbers of reading children should be brought to bear upon the problem of the individual. To accomplish this, work with the children was given departmental organization. My concern in this paper is with departmental organization as it benefits the reading child, and with the principles and policies which have been developed through departmental unity.

We think ordinarily that one who loves books has three general hallmarks: his reading is fairly continuous, there is a permanency of book interest, and this interest is maintained on a plane of merit. But in the child's contact with the library there are many evidences of modifications of normal book interests.

Instead of continuity of reading, the children's rooms are overcrowded in winter and have far less use in summer; instead of permanency of book interest extending over the difficult intermediate period, large numbers of those children who leave school before they reach high school have little or no library contact during their first working years, and without doubt the interesting experiences with working children, which librarians are p.r.o.ne to emphasize, give us an impression that a larger number are readers than careful investigation would show. And as for the quality of reading of many children who are at work we cannot maintain that it is always on a high plane.

Such results are largely due to environmental influences.

Deprived for the greater part of the year at least, of opportunity for normal youthful activities, the child's entire physical and mental schedule is thrown out of balance and he turns to reading, a recreation at his service at any time, only when there is little opportunity to follow other interests. Since the strain upon the ear and the eye, and back and brain is so great in the shop, the tendency in the first working years is too often toward recreations in which the book has no place. The power of the nickel library over the younger boy and girl can be broken by the presence of the public library, but the quality of the reading of the intermediate is often due to the popularity of the mediocre modern novel, with its present-day social interests.

For these and other reasons, the whole judgment of the results of library work with children can not rest upon such general tests of normal book interests as we have stated. Rather such variations from the normal are themselves conditions which influence the structure of the work and especially the principles of book presentation. Children with pressing social needs must have books with social values to meet those needs; chiefest of these are right social contacts, true social perspective, traditions of family and race, loveliness of nature, companionship of living things, right group a.s.sociation and group interests.

Starting with the principle that books should construct a larger social ideal for the greater number of children instead of confirming their present one, it was first necessary to find out from actual work with children, what their reactions to books with various interests are. Such knowledge was supplemented by the recorded testimony of men and women of their indebtedness to children's books, especially such as "Tom Brown" and "Little Women," and especially of their youthful appreciation of the relationships and interdependence of the characters.

After we were able to evaluate books and to have some definite idea of which were good and which poor, the question arose: Should we have books with manifestly weak values in the library as a concession to some children who might not read the better books, or by having them do we harm most those very children to whom we have conceded them? The gradual solution of this problem seems to me to be one of the greatest services which a library can render its children. A safe answer seems to be: No books weak in social ideals should be furnished, provided we do not lose reading children by their elimination. If such books are the best a child will read, and we take them away, causing him to lose interest in reading, he is apt to come under even less favorable influences.

Another problem which arose was that the c.u.mulative experience of librarians working with children showed that many books, weak in social viewpoint, lead only to others of their kind, and that such books are the ones read largely by those children which are most occasional and spasmodic in their reading. Here was a determining point in the establishment of standards of reading, for it brought us face to face with the question: Shall we consider this situation our fault since we supply such books to children who need something better vastly more than do children in happier circ.u.mstances, or shall we merely justify our selection by maintaining that those children will under no circ.u.mstances read a higher grade of books? However, observation showed that other books were read also by children with social limitations; books which, although apparently no better, lead to a better type of reading, and this prompted the policy of the removal of books which had little apparent influence in developing a good reading taste. This was done, however, with the definite intention that an increasingly better standard of reading must mean that no children cease using the library, an end only made possible by a knowledge of the value of the individual book to the individual child.