Hints on the Formation of School Libraries.

What sort of reading are our schools planting an appetite for? Are they really doing anything to instruct and form the mental taste, so that the pupils on leaving them may be safely left to choose their reading for themselves? It is clear in evidence that they are far from educating the young to take pleasure in what is intellectually noble and sweet. The statistics of our public libraries show that some cause is working mightily to prepare them only for delight in what is both morally and intellectually mean and foul. It would not indeed be fair to charge our public schools with positively giving this preparation; but it is their business to forestall and prevent such a result. If, along with the faculty of reading, they cannot also impart some safeguards of taste and habit against such a result, will the system prove a success?—Henry N. Hudson.

MUCH is being said, now-a-days, about the utility of school libraries; and in some instances much ill-directed, if not entirely misdirected, labor is being expended in their formation. Public libraries are not necessarily public benefits; and school libraries, unless carefully selected and judiciously managed, will not prove to be unmixed blessings. There are several questions which teachers and school officers should seriously consider before setting themselves to the task of establishing a library; and no teacher who is not himself a knower of books, and a reader, should presume to regulate and direct the reading of others.

What are the objects of a school library? They are twofold: First, to aid in cultivating a taste for good reading; second, to supply materials for supplementary study and independent research. Now, neither of these objects can be attained unless your library is composed of books selected especially with reference to the capabilities and needs of your pupils. Dealing, as you do, with pupils of various degrees of intellectual strength, warped by every variety of moral influence and home training, the cultivation of a taste for good reading among them is no small matter. To do this, your library must contain none but truly good books. It is a great mistake to suppose that every collection of books placed in a schoolhouse is a library; and yet that is the name which is applied to many very inferior collections. It is no uncommon thing to find these so-called libraries composed altogether of the odds and ends of literature,—of donations, entirely worthless to their donors; of second-hand school-books; of Patent Office Reports and other public documents; and of the dilapidated remains of some older and equally worthless collection of books: and with these you talk about cultivating a taste for good reading! One really good book, a single copy of “St. Nicholas,” is worth more than all this trash. Get it out of sight at once! The value of a library—no matter for what purpose it has been founded—depends not upon the number of its books, but upon their character. And so the first rule to be observed in the formation of a school library is, Buy it at first hand, even though you should begin with a single volume, and shun all kinds of donations, unless they be donations of cash, or books of unquestionable value.

In selecting books for purchase, you will have an eye single to the wants of the students who are to use them. A school library should be in no sense a public circulating library. You cannot cater to the literary tastes of the public, and at the same time serve the best interests of your pupils. Books relating to history, to biography, and to travel will form a very large portion of your library. These should be chosen with reference to the age and mental capacity of those who are to read them. No book should be bought merely because it is a good book, but because we know that it can be made useful in the attainment of certain desired ends. The courses of reading indicated in the following chapters of this work, it is hoped, will assist you largely in making a wise selection as well as in directing to a judicious use of books. For the selection of a book is only half of your duty: the profitable use of it is the other half; and this lesson should be early taught to your pupils.

If, through means of your school library or otherwise, you succeed in enlisting the interest of a young person in profitable methodical reading, you have accomplished a great deal towards the forwarding of his education and the formation of his character. It is a great mistake to suppose that a boy of twelve cannot pursue a course of reading in English history; if properly directed and encouraged, he will enjoy it far better than the perusal of the milk-and-water story-books which, under the guise of “harmless juvenile literature,” have been placed in his hands by well-meaning teachers or parents.

In a former chapter I have shown you how, with a library of only fifty volumes, you may have in your possession the very best of all that the world’s master-minds have ever written,—food, as I have said, for study, and meditation, and mind growth enough for a lifetime. Such a library is worth more than ten thousand volumes of the ordinary “popular” kind of books. So, also, the reading of a very few books, carefully and methodically, by your pupils—the constant presence of the very best books in our language, and the exclusion of the trashy and the vile—will give them more real enjoyment and infinitely greater profit than the desultory or hasty reading of many volumes. A small library is to be despised only when it contains inferior books.