A Librarian's Open Shelf Part 2

"Henry Vane's Crime," etc., etc.

In one case, at least, this fact has been recognized by a publisher, for "The Vengeance of James Vansittart," whose t.i.tle is included in the list given above, has appeared in a later edition as "James Vansittart's Vengeance"--a palpable improvement.

I shall not discuss the cause of this change in the use of the possessive, though it seems to me an evident Gallicism, nor shall I open the question of whether it is a mere pa.s.sing fad or the beginning of an actual alteration in the language. However this may be, it seems undeniable that there is an actual and considerable difference in the use of the possessive to-day and its use ten years ago, at least in formal t.i.tles and headings. I have confined myself to book-t.i.tles, because that is the department where the tendency presents itself to me most clearly; but it may be seen on street signs, in advertis.e.m.e.nts, and in newspaper headings.

It is not to be found yet in the spoken language, at least it is not noticeable there, but it would be decidedly unsafe to prophesy that it will never appear there. Ten years from now we may hear about "the breaking of the arm of John Smith" and "the hat of Tom," without a thought that these phrases have not been part of our idiomatic speech since Shakespeare's time.

SELECTIVE EDUCATION[1]

[1] Read before the Schoolmen of New York.

Since Darwin called attention to the role of what he named "natural selection" in the genesis and preservation of species, and since his successors, both followers and opponents, have added to this many other kinds of selection that are continually operative, it has become increasingly evident that from one standpoint we may look on the sum of natural processes, organic and inorganic, as a vast selective system, as the result of which things are as they are, whether the results are the positions of celestial bodies or the relative places of human beings in the intellectual or social scale. The exact const.i.tution of the present population of New York is the result of a great number of selective acts, some regular, others more or less haphazard. Selection is no less selection because it occurs by what we call chance--for chance is only our name for the totality of trivial and unconsidered causes. When, however, we count man and man's efforts in the sum of natural objects and forces, we have to reckon with his intelligence in these selective processes. I desire to call attention to the place that they play in educative systems and in particular to the way in which they may be furthered or made more effective by books, especially by public collections of books.

When we think of any kind of training as it affects the individual, we most naturally regard it as changing that individual, as making him more fit, either for life in general or for some special form of life's activities. But when we think of it as affecting a whole community or a whole nation, we may regard it as essentially a selective process. In a given community it is not only desirable that a certain number of men should be trained to do a specified kind of work, but it is even more desirable that these should be the men that are best fitted to do this work. When Mr. Luther Burbank brings into play the selection by means of which he achieves his remarkable results in plant breeding he gets rid of the unfit by destruction, and as all are unfit for the moment that do not advance the special end that he has in view, he burns up plants--new and interesting varieties perhaps--by the hundred thousand. We cannot destroy the unfit, nor do we desire to do so, for from the educational point of view unfitness is merely bad adjustment. There is a place for every man in the world and it is the educators business to see that he reaches it, if not by formative, then by selective processes. This selection is badly made in our present state of civilization. It depends to a large extent upon circ.u.mstances remote from the training itself--upon caprice, either that of the person to be trained or of his parents, upon accidents of birth or situation, upon a thousand irrelevant things; but in every case there are elements present in the training itself that aid in determining it. A young man begins to study medicine, and he finds that his physical repulsion for work in the dissecting-room can not be overcome. He abandons the study and by doing so eliminates an unfit person. A boy who has no head for figures enters a business college. He can not get his diploma, and the community is spared one bad bookkeeper. Certainly in some instances, possibly in all, technical and professional schools that are noted for the excellence of their product are superior not so much because they have better methods of training, but because their material is of better quality, owing to selection exercised either purposely, or automatically, or perhaps by some chance. The same is true of colleges. Of two inst.i.tutions with the same curriculum and equally able instructors, the one with the widest reputation will turn out the best graduates because it attracts abler men from a wider field. This is true even in such a department as athletics. To him that hath shall be given. This is purely an automatic selective effect.

It would appear desirable to dwell more upon selective features in educational training, to ascertain what they are in each case and how they work, and to control and dispose them with more systematic care. Different minds will always attach different degrees of importance to natural and acquired fitness, but probably all will agree that training bestowed upon the absolutely unfit is worse than useless, and that there are persons whose natural apt.i.tudes are so great that upon them a minimum of training will produce a maximum effect. Such selective features as our present educational processes possess, the examination, for instance, are mostly exclusive; they aim to bar out the unfit rather than to attract the fit.

Here is a feature on which some attention may well be fixt.

How do these considerations affect the subject of general education? Are we to affirm that arithmetic is only for the born mathematician and Latin for the born linguist, and endeavor to ascertain who these may be? Not so; for here we are training not experts but citizens. Discrimination here must be not in the quality but in the quant.i.ty of training. We may divide the members of any community into cla.s.ses according as their formal education--their school and college training--has lasted one, two, three, four, or more years. There has been a selection here, but it has operated, in general, even more imperfectly than in the case of special training.

Persons who are mentally qualified to continue their schooling to the end of a college course, and who by so doing would become more useful members of the community, are obliged to be content with two or three years in the lower grades, while others, who are unfitted for the university, are kept at it until they take, or fail to take, the bachelor's degree. An ideal state of things, of course, would be to give each person the amount of general education for which he is fitted and then stop. This would be difficult of realization even if financial considerations did not so often interfere. But at least we may keep in view the desirability of preventing too many misfits and of insisting, so far as possible, on any selective features that we may discover in present systems.

For instance, a powerful selective feature is the attractiveness of a given course of study to those who are desired to pursue it. If we can find a way, for example, to make our high school courses attractive to those who are qualified to take them, while at the same time rendering them very distasteful to those who are not so qualified, we shall evidently have taken a step in the right direction. It is clear that both parts of this prescription must be taken together or there is no true selection. Much has been done of late years toward making educational courses of all kinds interesting and attractive, but it is to be feared that their attractiveness has been such as to appeal to the unfit as well as to the fit. If we sugar-coat our pills indiscriminately and mix them with candy, many will partake who need another kind of medicine altogether. We must so arrange things that the fit will like while the unfit dislike, and for this purpose the less sugar-coating the better.

This is no easy problem and it is intended merely to indicate it here, not to propose a general solution.

The one thing to which attention should be directed is the role that may be and is played by the printed book in selective education. There is more or less effort to discredit books as educative tools and to lay emphasis on oral instruction and manual training. We need not decry these, but, it must be remembered that after all the book contains the record of man's progress; we may tell how to do a thing, and show how to do it, but we shall never do it in a better way or explain the why and wherefore, and surely transmit that ability and that explanation to posterity, without the aid of a stable record of some kind. If we are sure that our students could and would pick out only what they needed, as a wild animal picks his food in the woods, we might go far toward solving our problem, by simply turning them loose in a collection of books. Some people have minds that qualify them to profit by such "browsing," and some of these have practically educated themselves in a library. Even in the more common cases where formal training is absolutely necessary, access to other books than text-books is an aid to selection both qualitative and quant.i.tative.

Books may serve as samples. To take an extreme case, a boy who had no knowledge whatever of the nature of law or medicine would certainly not be competent to choose between them in selecting a profession, and a month spent in a library where there were books on both subjects would certainly operate to lessen his incompetence. Probably it would not be rash to a.s.sert that with free access to books, under proper guidance, both before and during a course of training, the persons who begin that course will include more of the fit and those who finish it will include less of the unfit, than without such access.

Let us consider one or two concrete examples. A college boy has the choice of several different courses. He knows little of them, but thinks that one will meet his needs. He elects it and finds too late that he is wasting his time. Another boy, whose general reading has been sufficient to give him some superficial knowledge of the subject-matter in all the courses, sees clearly which will benefit him, and profits by that knowledge.

Again, a boy, full of the possibilities that would lead him to appreciate the best in literature, has gained his knowledge of it from a teacher who looks upon a literary masterpiece only as something to be dissected. The student has been disgusted instead of inspired, and his whole life has been deprived of one of the purest and most uplifting of all influences.

Had he been brought up in a library where he could make literary friends and develop literary enthusiasms, his course with the dry as dust teacher would have been only an unpleasant incident, instead of the wrecking of a part of his intellectual life.

Still again, a boy on a farm has vague aspirations. He knows that he wants a broader horizon, to get away from his cramped environment--that is about all. How many boys, impelled by such feelings, have gone out into the world with no clear idea of what they are fitted to do, or even what they really desire! To how many others has the companions.h.i.+p of a few books meant the opening of a peep-hole, thru which, dimly perhaps, but none the less really, have been descried definite possibilities, needs, and opportunities!

To all of these youths books have been selective aids merely--they have added little or nothing to the actual training whose extent and character they have served to point out. Such cases, which it would be easy to multiply, ill.u.s.trate the value of books in the selective functions of training. To a.s.sert that they exercise such a function is only another way of saying that a mind orients itself by the widest contact with other minds. There are other ways of a.s.suring this contact, and these should not be neglected; but only thru books can it approach universality both in s.p.a.ce and in time. How else could we know exactly what Homer and St.

Augustine and Descartes thought and what Tolstoi and Lord Kelvin and William James, we will say, are even now thinking?

It has scarcely been necessary to say all this to convince you of the value of books as aids to education; but it is certainly interesting to find that in an examination of the selective processes in education, we meet with our old friends in such an important role.

A general collection of books, then, const.i.tutes an important factor in the selective part of an education. Where shall we place this collection?

I venture to say that altho every school must have a library to aid in the formative part of its training, the library as a selective aid should be large and central and should preferably be at the disposal of the student not only during the period of his formal training, but before and after it. This points to the public library, and to close cooperation between it and the school, rather than to the expansion of the cla.s.sroom library.

This is, perhaps, not the place to dispute the wisdom of our Board of Education in developing cla.s.sroom libraries, but it may be proper to put in a plea for confining them to books that bear more particularly on the subjects of instruction. The general collection of books should be outside of the school, because the boy is destined to spend most of his life outside of the school. His education by no means ends with his graduation.

The agents that operate to develop and change him will be at work so long as he lives, and it is desirable that the book should be one of these. If he says good-by to the book when he leaves school, that part of his training is likely to be at an end. If he uses, in connection with, and parallel to, his formal education a general collection of books outside of the school, he will continue to use it after he leaves school. And even so far as the special cla.s.sroom library is concerned, it must be evident that a large general collection of books that may be drawn upon freely is a useful supplement. For the teacher's professional use, the larger the collection at his disposal the better. A sum of money spent by the city in improving and making adequate the pedagogical section of its public library, particularly in the department of circulation, will be expended to greater advantage than many times the amount devoted to a large number of small collections on the same subjects in schools.

These are the considerations that have governed the New York Public Library in its effort to be of a.s.sistance to the teachers and pupils in the public schools of the city. Stated formally, these efforts manifest themselves in the following directions:

(1) The making of library use continuous from the earliest possible age, thru school life and afterwards;

(2) Cooperation with the teacher in guiding and limiting the child's reading during the school period;

(3) Aid within the library in the preparation of school work;

(4) The supplementing of cla.s.sroom libraries by the loan of books in quant.i.ty;

(5) The cultivation of personal relations between library a.s.sistants and teachers in their immediate neighborhood;

(6) The furnis.h.i.+ng of accurate and up-to-date information to schools regarding the library's resources and its willingness to place them at the school's disposal;

(7) The increase of the library's circulation collection along lines suggested and desired by teachers;

(8) The granting of special privileges to teachers and special students who use the library for purposes of study.

Toward the realization of these aims three departments are now cooperating, each of them in charge of an expert in his or her special line of work.

(1) The children's rooms in the various libraries, now under the direction of an expert supervisor.

(2) The traveling library office.

(3) The division of school work, with an a.s.sistant in each branch, under skilled headquarters superintendence.

When our plans, which are already in good working order, are completely carried out, we shall be able to guarantee to every child guidance in his reading up to and thru his school course, with direction in a line of influence that will make him a user of books thruout his life and create in him a feeling of attachment to the public library as the home and dispenser of books and as a permanent intellectual refuge from care, trouble, and material things in general, as well as a mine of information on all subjects that may benefit or interest him.

Some of the obstacles to the immediate realization of our plans in full may be briefly stated as follows:

(1) Lack of sufficient funds. With more money we could buy more books, pay higher salaries, and employ more persons. The a.s.sistants in charge of children's rooms should be women of the highest culture and ability, and it is difficult to secure proper persons at our present salaries.

a.s.sistants in charge of school work must be persons of tact and quickness of perception, and they should have no other work to do; whereas at present we are obliged to give this work to library a.s.sistants in addition to their ordinary routine duties, to avoid increasing our staff by about forty a.s.sistants, which our appropriation does not permit.

(2) Misunderstanding on the part of the public, and also to some extent on the part of teachers, of our aims, ability, and att.i.tude. This I am glad to say is continually lessening. We can scarcely expect that each of our five hundred a.s.sistants should be thoroly imbued with the spirit of helpfulness toward the schools or even that they should perfectly understand what we desire and aim to do. Nor can we expect that our wish to aid should be appreciated by every one of fifty thousand teachers or a million parents. This will come in time.

(3) A low standard of honesty on the part of certain users of the library.

It is somewhat disheartening to those who are laboring to do a public service to find that some of those whom they are striving to benefit, look upon them merely as easy game. To prevent this and at the same time to withstand those who urge that such misuse of the library should be met by the withdrawal of present privileges and facilities uses up energy that might otherwise be directed toward the improvement of our service. Now, like the intoxicated man, we sometimes refuse invitations to advance because it is "all we can do to stay where we are." Here is an opportunity for all the selective influences that we may bring to bear, and unfortunately the library can have but little part in these.

Have I wandered too far from my theme? The good that a public library may do, the influence that it may exert, and the position that it may a.s.sume in a community, depend very largely on the ability and tact with which it is administered and the resources at its disposal. Its public services may be various, but probably there is no place in which it may be of more value than side by side with the public school; and I venture to think that this is the case largely because education to be complete must select as well as train, must compel the fit to step forward and the unfit to retire, and must do this, not only at the outset of a course of training but continuously thruout its duration. We speak of a student being "put thru the mill," and we must not forget that a mill not only grinds and stamps into shape but also sifts and selects. A finished product of a given grade is always such not only by virtue of formation and adaptation but also by virtue of selection. In human training one of the most potent of these selective agencies is the individual will, and to train that will and make it effective in the right direction there is nothing better than constant a.s.sociation with the records of past aims and past achievements.

This must be my excuse for saying so much of libraries in general, and of one library in particular, in an address on what I have ventured to give the name of Selective Education.

THE USES OF FICTION[2]

[2] Read before the American Library a.s.sociation, Asheville Conference, May 28, 1907.

Literature is becoming daily more of a dynamic and less of a static phenomenon. In other days the great body of written records remained more or less stable and with its attendant body of tradition did its work by a sort of quiet pressure on that portion of the community just beneath it--on a special cla.s.s peculiarly subject to its influence. To-day we have added to this effect that of a moving mult.i.tude of more or less ephemeral books, which appear, do their work, and pa.s.s on out of sight. They are light, but they make up for their lack of weight by the speed and ease with which they move. Owing to them the use of books is becoming less and less limited to a cla.s.s, and more and more familiar to the ma.s.ses. The book nowadays is in motion. Even the cla.s.sics, the favorites of other days, have left their musty shelves and are moving out among the people.

Where one man knew and loved Shakespeare a century ago, a thousand know and love him to-day. The literary blood is circulating and in so doing is giving life to the body politic. In thus wearing itself out the book is creating a public appreciation that makes itself felt in a demand for reprinting, hence worthy books are surer of perpetuation in this swirling current than they were in the old time reservoir. But besides these books whose literary life is continuous, though their paper and binding may wear out, there are other books that vanish utterly. By the time that the material part of them needs renewing, the book itself has done its work.

Its value at that moment is not enough, or is not sufficiently appreciated, to warrant reprinting. It drops out of sight and its place is taken by another, fresh from the press. This part of our moving literature is what is called ephemeral, and properly so; but no stigma necessarily attaches to the name. In the first place, it is impossible to draw a line between the ephemeral and the durable. "One storm in the world's history has never cleared off," said the wit--"the one we are having now." Yet the conditions of to-day, literary as well as meteorological, are not necessarily lasting.