DISCUSSION MISS MARGARET ASHMUN, instructor in English, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wis.-What Mr. McAndrew has said is so convincing that it needs no comment from me to show its truth. What I shall have to say is merely in the nature of corroboration. I speak from the standpoint not of the librarian but of the teacher of English in the high school and the college. Naturally, what has interested me most in Mr. McAndrew's paper is the matter of English teaching, which has, as you have noted, received some rather severe comments. The justice of those remarks I am sorry to say I must admit. It is safe to say that two-thirds of the poor teaching in high-school English classes is due to the failure of teachers to realize that high-school pupils are boys and girls-not men and women. The first or second-year high-school students are children with the child's love of a story, of action, of the lively, vigorous, pulsating facts of life. Why should these young people be denied the wholesome things which their natures demand? They are hungering for the bread of reality and we give them the cold stone of abstraction. This unwillingness on the part of the teacher to recognize the needs and desires of the younger students extends from the classroom to the library. A while ago a man showed me with pride a list of outside readings which were to be demanded of all of his high-school students. It was a very pretty list. Dryden and Pope were conspicuous upon it, Chaucer, Milton, Shelley—all the great names were there: so many books for the first halfyear, so many for the second half-and all to be reported upon at much length in written book reviews. The plan looked very impressive, laid off in squares in the high-school yearbook. But my heart ached for the poor children. What did they care about the qualities of style of Dryden or De Quincey? They were craving something quite different-something which should stimulate and divert them, thrill them with tales of action and heroism, interpret for them the wonderful, puzzling world in which they had only lately discovered themselves to be. The man who devised that list made the mistake that hundreds of high-school teachers and librarians are making, and to which Mr. McAndrew has referred that of not allowing for the emotional, the human, the vivid, irrepressible love of reality that is one of the chief instincts of the high-school boy and girl. That man simply could not understand that it was wise or safe to give the students anything that they enjoyed. "The more suffering, the greater gain," seemed to be his theory of pedagogy—and a fatal theory that is, when it is applied to the reading of books. It is only by enjoying books that one can ever learn to love them. It is only by loving books that one can become in any sense a cultured sharer in the great literary benefactions of the ages. It may be thought from what has been said here that a low standard of taste is to be set up, that mere sensationalism is to be allowed and recommended because some crude youngster happen to like that sort of thing. I am sure that neither Mr. McAndrew nor anybody else wishes to be so understood. It is possible to lead young people on by gradual stages from the most uncultivated taste to something creditable and worthy-but the stages must be gradual and the uncultivated taste must be frankly admitted at the first. Cramming the classics down the throats of reluctant young persons is a dismal and undignified work. How much better to set them before a full table of less delicate fare and let them feed with the zest of healthy appetites, developing sooner or later a recognition of the flavor of what was caviar to them when they began! The best use of the high-school library is accomplished when the English teachers and the librarian combine their forces, agreeing to make the most of every individual student, beginning at whatever stage of development he has reached. But most of all the librarian must make of herself an inspiring force. She must never forget that she is trying above everything to develop in the students a real taste for good literature. She must be able to imagine herself a restless, action-loving, hero-worshipping boy, or even a vapid, sentimental, feather-brained girl. She must put herself in the place of the student whose needs she is trying to supply, giving him not what she herself admires but what his crude young appetite craves. She must work with infinite patience, with a sincere love of the books that she is handling, with a profound and personal interest in the young people of the school. Then, however satisfying the results-and they are bound to be satisfying-the high-schoo library will be doing its best to make the high school a place of culture. A. E. PETERSON, Department of History, Morris High School, New York, N.Y.In regard to library work in connection with their subject, history teachers may be divided into three groups: First, those who hold that the use of the library is absolutely superfluous, who want everything within the covers of a single well-chosen textbook thoroly digested, and argue for the disciplinary value of this kind of instruction. A gentleman of this class expressed this view before the history section of the Association of the Middle States and Maryland last winter. The only thing he wanted the pupils to use outside the textbook was a question book on the contents of said textbook, and he closed with the axiomatic statement that every boy who had mastered the thousand questions contained therein was invariably successful in passing the college examinations. You see it is certainly not safe to assume that all teachers believe in library work. A second class consists of those who think the best textbooks too narrow, who believe in library work, who recognize the value of getting different viewpoints, who think the child should be interested as well as disciplined, but who find their good intentions crushed beneath the upper millstone labelled "Lack of time," and the nether one labelled "Examinations." The third class consists of those who generally recognize the necessity of examination, who feel tremendously the limitation of time, but refuse to be crushed by the grinding of these millstones. They will not be bound by present considerations only; they see in the children before them the men and women of tomorrow, whose duty it will be to build well and strongly upon foundations already laid; they want these children to become open-minded, broad-minded, fair-minded citizens of the nation; they see in the subject of history the greatest possibility for training in this direction; they will risk much rather than have their pupils lose the opportunity for acquaintance with books, many books, plenty of books. There are in this class those extremists who go so far as to discard the textbook absolutely and resort entirely to the library. Such a course seems to me inadvisable except under unusual conditions: for instance, if a local committee permitted the use of some wretched textbook only. However, unless I am very much mistaken, what teachers need most to help them in the use of the library for history are practical devices, ways and means. Most schools are without librarians, trained or untrained. In most schools the libraries are not cataloged. Many, indeed, are without any library room, and difficulties arise. The use of the library is apt to be subversive of discipline in schools where there is no librarian. I found once on assuming the principalship of a high school that the library had been locked up for a year. In a school without a librarian it often works well to have branch libraries, as it were, within the building, history books placed in the history classroom, science books in the science rooms or laboratories, etc. What we want is that pupils use the books, and they will certainly use them more if they are near at hand. I think I never got better results in history teaching than when I had a large table and a case of history books in the corner of a room where the pupils both studied and recited. Certainly the less "red tape" the pupil has to follow in order to get at the library book, the better. I would like to tell you of a device that I have employed this last year that seems to me adaptable to almost any conditions in a large or a small school. I had three divisions of second-year pupils studying the eastern nations and Greece, reciting three periods per week for a half year-not an extensive amount of time I think you will agree. I organized each division with a chairman, secretary, and executive committee. I set apart five periods during the term when special reports should be given, based on library reading, the program for each such meeting to be arranged and executed under the charge of the class officers. Some two weeks in advance of each meeting I gave into the hands of the class committee a list of topics like this: TOPICS SUGGESTED FOR HISTORY CONFERENCE I. 2. An imaginary speech by Cimon before the Athenian Assembly An imaginary speech by Pericles in opposition. 3. More about the Athenian Assembly. 4. Greek burial customs. A carbon copy of the same was placed in the hands of the librarian. From this list of topics choices were made. It was understood beforehand that the reports were not to be read from a paper, tho notes might be used; also that the time limit was five minutes per pupil. The meetings were conducted with due regard to parliamentary order, and discussion of the topics presented was encouraged in the minutes preceding adjournment. When we were discussing the Athenian Assembly one class was ambitious enough to present and very effectively-a scene from Aristophanes' Acharnians. And one of my colleagues had a class in Roman history which had a Julius Cæsar meeting. Papers were given on "Cæsar as a General," Cæsar as a Writer," "Cæsar as a Statesman," and a scene was presented from Shakespeare's Julius Cæsar. I tried a similar experiment with three classes studying later English history, the pupils in this case averaging two years older. The results were equally satisfactory. You will see, of course, that in this device I was trying a little experiment in social education as well as furthering the use of the library. Before closing, allow me to present this bit of testimony: library work ought not be abandoned or despaired of because of apparent lack of books. Teachers should make their wants known. I was once teaching in a Connecticut city whose public library was rich along certain lines. The librarian (newly appointed, by the way) demurred when I requested the loan of these books to supplement those in the school library, but an appeal to the trustees soon placed them at my disposal-an appeal, by the way, that was far-reaching because it inaugurated in that city for the first time a system of co-operation between the public library and the public schools. At another time, earlier in my experience and in a smaller community where few books were available either in the school library or the public library, an appeal to the state board of education brought a case of just such books as I desired, loaned to the school for the entire term. Another case for the next term followed the return of the first one. You see I have proof of the truth in the Good Old Book, where it says: Seek and ye shall find; Knock and it shall be opened unto you. ARTHUR I. ANDREWS, assistant professor of history, Simmons College, Boston, Mass., briefly emphasized certain points already made by the previous speakers. In particular, he called attention to the aid which the work in cataloging as suggested by Mr. McAndrew would be to the teachers of history in colleges. He stated that the students were generally found lacking in knowledge of how to get at information contained in books, and that any such knowledge of indexes, tables of contents, and other parts of a book, would be exceedingly valuable when a student was confronted with courses of history in the colleges. Mr. Andrews denied knowing how time for this instruction could be secured in the secondary schools, but desired to emphasize its value from the point of view of the college teacher. Mr. Andrews commented upon the point made by Mr. Tripp as to leaving good literature around where it would be handy, and he emphasized how much this would aid in giving the right kind of book an equal opportunity for consideration. He thought lists of reading, such as of outside reading or of summer reading, would aid materially to give the better class of books this equal chance to be read. He felt that a student was less likely to read bad books, or trash, if the better class of reading was made easily available. He doubted whether there would be so much reading of Laura Jean Libby and her class of writing if the lists of Scott, Stevenson, Kipling, and the like, were placed before the student. Mr. Andrews expressed the hope that the liking for Scott and the other writers mentioned was not entirely a thing of the past as far as small boys were concerned. He quoted his own experience with a small boy of thirteen who had shown a great liking for Scott's novels, an appreciative liking. He also told a story of the small boy who came to a librarian with a sheepish air and asked for something on the Book of Common Prayer. As he was dressed in overalls, and showed clear signs of acquaintance with manual labor, the librarian was amused to hear him go on and say that he was tired of "them fictious books." She was also more surprised when the Book of Common Prayer was kept two weeks and then renewed. Later the same boy took out several books on church history. Reverting to Scott, Mr. Andrews expressed the opinion that there was a Scott age for boys from about ten years to thirteen years of age, when the average boy could easily be induced to wade thru the less interesting early chapters with a promise of exciting doings further on. He also expressed the thought that if a boy were thoroly inoculated with Scott, he would care less for such things as Dare-Devil Dick, the Desperado, and would never get away from "sensible" reading. Another point that Mr. Andrews made was in regard to special topics, calling attention to the need of some supervision for such topics. He stated as his opinion that the topics should have a limited number of references to each and that the bibliographies should always be annotated with the student's opinion as to the value of each reference. He also spoke of the way in which a boy or a girl was influenced by the binding. Some bindings have been known to make even Sunday-school books seem attractive, while a stern, stiff-looking binding would not attract, but would cause boys and girls to pass such books by in dismay. THE TRAINING OF TEACHERS IN THE USE OF BOOKS AND THE LIBRARY AND IN A KNOWLEDGE OF CHILDREN'S BOOKS JAMES V. STURGES, PRINCIPAL, STATE NORMAL SCHOOL, GENESEO, N.Y. We assume it to be true that within the last twenty-five years radical changes have taken place in the aims and methods of teaching and in the means employed for disseminating knowledge; that courses of study both for the child and the adolescent are ever making greater demands upon the teacher, the equipment, the organization, and the resources of the school; that the remarkable progress in the last decade-commercial, social, political, intellectual-has brought the library with its countless volumes within easy reach of the humblest citizen of our commonwealth; and finally, that if the library, now that its work is standardized and bibliography is become a science, is to become a real power in human uplift, all must be taught how to use it. If these assumptions are true, the schools for the training of teachers. are brought face to face with a serious problem. Coincident with new courses of study in the arts and the sciences are courses in the schools of pedagogy to prepare teachers for these special departments. But not so with the library in its relation to the whole public-school question. For example, the state of New York, exclusive of New York City, has fourteen city training schools, ninety training classes, and eleven state normal schools. It has approximately eight million volumes in its traveling and school libraries, valued at about four million dollars. It has recently adopted an excellent syllabus for its elementary and secondary schools, one that requires the finest preparation of teachers in language in literature. But not 5 per cent. of these schools are giving instruction in the use of books and the library and in a knowledge of children's books. And New York State is not an exception. In 1907, a year after the publication by this Association of the Report on Library Instruction in Normal Schools, three hundred letters were sent out to learn how many normal schools over the country were giving courses in library methods. The answers received showed that ten different normal schools out of a total of two hundred and fifty-nine in the United States were giving such courses. In 1908 investigation showed that over thirty normal schools over the country were giving library instruction, and during 1909 still other normals have introduced such courses. While these statistics, in the light of assumptions made, prove the existence of a serious situation, they also clearly reveal the intention on the part of the normal schools all over the country to meet one of the vital needs of the schools and the public. Is the need a vital one? The following data will answer this question. In June, 1908, a group of forty district school children applied to the |