If those who grow hoarse 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,classrooms 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"!
