To make sure of the parents being back of us in our relations to
the children, we have a little blank application for membership,
which is signed by the parent or guardian as well as the child.
It is noticeable that on many of these cards the children write
not only their own names but the names of their parents, the
latter, themselves unable to write, affixing their cross.
The volunteer visitors, as opportunity offers, on cards placed in
their hands for the purpose, make a record of information
concerning the family, their history, condition, habits, their
reading at the inception of the library, and subsequently such
items as may reveal their further history and the possible
relation of the library to their life.
Close upon the heels of this effort to make books mean to poor
children what they mean to the more fortunate, followed the idea
of bringing to them a knowledge of those ways of having a good
time within the walls of one's own castle that are so familiar in
families where parents have leisure and ingenuity, and that make
our childhood seem to our adult years, of a truth, a golden age.
Without the elbow-room that some kinds of fun require, without
money to buy games, without leisure to play them or to teach them
to their children, forever held down by drudgery, forever pressed
upon by the serious hand-to-hand fight to keep the wolf from the
door, is it strange that the poor know next to nothing of the
commonest home games and diversions? To the Home Libraries, a
name sweet and dear to us who have had to do with them, came this
further idea of Home Amusements. After the exchange of books,
conversation about them, the recording of opinions, perhaps also
reading aloud by the visitor or the children, they turn from
books to play. It is the duty of the visitor to be informed in
the art of merriment, and to teach the children all sorts of ways
of having fun at home. Nor is it a slight advantage that thus
inducement comes to the grown-up folks to look on and laugh too.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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