Part 5 (1/2)
BOOKLESS HOMES
The bookless homes of the well-to-do people are familiar to all. Inside those walls no books are to be found but a few gift books, chosen for their bindings rather than their contents, and perhaps others which some agent has pressed upon them. What can be done to stimulate reading in these homes? Ten-cent magazines and cheap stories are devoured by mother and daughters to the destruction of sane thoughts and connected ideas.
The man of the house each day reads his newspaper, containing accounts of crimes, accidents and the funny paper. Happily, it also contains articles of travel, invention and discovery, otherwise his brain would be weakened.
Young people come from these bookless homes to college each year, showing great confusion of ideas, vacuity of mind and utter lack of information. They need us, need libraries, need the force of the state to help them. Ninety-four per cent of our young people never get into college. Ninety per cent, it is said, never go to school after they have pa.s.sed the age of fourteen years.
The contribution of the library is to elevate the standard of the town.
Books depicting n.o.ble, earnest, well-meaning lives will cause the social standard to progress, and other standards with it.
OREGON LIBRARY COMMISSION.
NEED OF FREE LIBRARIES
A library is an essential part of a broad system of education, and a community should think it as discreditable to be without a well-conducted free public library as to be without a good school. If it is the duty of the state to give each future citizen an opportunity to learn to read, it is equally its duty to give each citizen an opportunity to use that power wisely for himself and the state.
Wholesome literature can be furnished to all the readers in a community at a fraction of the cost necessary to teach them to read, and the power to read may then become a means to a life-long education.
The books that a boy reads for pleasure do more to determine his ideals and shape his character than the text-books he studies in the schools.
Bad and indifferent literature is now so common that the boys will have some sort of reading. If they have a good public library they will read wholesome books and learn to admire Was.h.i.+ngton, Lincoln and other great men. Without a library many of them will gloat over the exploits of depraved men and women, and their earliest ambitions will be tainted.
Each town needs a library to furnish more practice in reading for the little folks in school; it needs it to give the boys and girls who have learned to read a taste for wholesome literature that informs and inspires; it needs it as a center for an intellectual and spiritual activity that shall leaven the whole community and make healthful and inspiring themes the burden of the common thought--subst.i.tuting, by natural methods, clean conversation and literature for petty gossip, scandal and oral and printed teachings in vice.
F. A. HUTCHINS.
THE LIBRARY AND BOYS
”In Madison, N. J., a bird club of boys met twice a week, once for study and once for an expedition, and found the library's resources on this topic to be of interest and value. How to utilize profitably the activities of a 'gang' of boys is worth much planning. One librarian is reported to have started a chair-caning cla.s.s to interest restless boys; another had a museum of flowers and insects, another conducted a branch of the flower mission. Not less interesting, and perhaps more instructive, is a series of talks on Indian legends accompanied by hunting expeditions for the half-buried implements and relics found in almost every meadow in some parts of the country. Boys are eager to learn about natural history and natural science, and they will be encouraged at the public library.”
IRENE VAN KLEECK.
THE LIBRARY
Get good books; give them a home attractive to readers of good books; name a friend of good books as mistress of this home--and you have a library; all share in its support and all get pleasure and profit from it if they will; without divisions religious, politic or social, it unites all in the pursuit of high pleasure and sound learning, and gives that common interest in a common concern which is the basis of all local pride.
If you have rightly read a book, that book is yours.
You cannot always choose your companions; you can always choose your books. You can, if you will, spend a few minutes every day with the best and wisest men and women the world has ever known.
The people you have known, the things you have said and done, and the books you have read, all these are now a part of you.
You like yourself better when you are with people who are well-bred and clever; you respect yourself more when you are reading a bright and wholesome book, for you are then in the company of the wise.
J. C. DANA.
After the church and the school, the free public library is the most effective influence for good in America. The moral, mental and material benefits to be derived from a carefully selected collection of good books, free for the use of all the people, cannot be overestimated. No community can afford to be without a library.