A reading club must not necessarily be a club for the study or
enjoyment of stories, history or poetry. Under the guidance of
the kind of librarian who aims far above her audience, it may
turn into something like Mr. Wopsle's quarterly examinations of
his great aunt's school, "when what he did," says Pip, "was to
turn up his cuffs, stick up his hair and give us Mark Antony's
oration over the body of Caesar. This was always followed by
Collins's Ode on the Passions, wherein I particularly venerated
Mr. Wopsle as Revenge, throwing his bloodstained sword in thunder
down, and taking the war-renouncing trumpet with a withering
look." There may be a club for making things out of the Beard
books, for the study of sleight-of- hand, for exchanging
postcards with children in other countries and reading about the
places on them. It may make historical pilgrimages to places of
interest in the town or may collect stones and clay nodules, and
read about them. The important thing is to find children of
nearly the same age and neighborhood with interests in common,
and let them decide whom they shall ask to join the club after it
is formed. Better yet if they ask for the club in the first
place. One not very long-lived Settlement club which I knew was
of boys who wished to read and act Shakespeare, but a very few
evenings convinced them that as they could not even read the
lines without stumbling, they were not on the road to the actors'
Temple of Fame. They were boys who had left school at fourteen in
the lower grades, except one, who had taken his High School
examinations and is now at the head of a department in a large
department store and a prominent member of a political study
club. The others, who had expected to play prominent
Shakespearean parts with little or no work, were easily
discouraged, dropped off and were seen no more. The reading of
very simple plays at first is a good stepping-stone to a study of
Shakespeare later, but the plays must be interesting enough to
hold the attention of boys who do not read fluently.
LIBRARY CLUBS FOR BOYS AND GIRLS
The usefulness of the reading club as an opportunity of
broadening the interests of the child is emphasized in the
following paper, printed in the Library Journal, May, 1911, which
gives an account of the organization of clubs under the direction
of a supervisor in the Cleveland Public Library. Marie Hammond
Milliken was born in Pittsburgh, Pa., was graduated from
Wellesley College in 1905 and from the Training School for
Children's Librarians in 1907; was children's librarian in the
Cleveland Public Library from 1907 to 1910; Supervisor of reading
clubs from 1910 to 1912, and since that time has been a branch
librarian.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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