Papers and Proceedings of the Twenty-Third General Meeting of the American Library Association: Held at Waukesha, Wisconsin, July 4-10, 1901
Science
Papers and Proceedings of the Twenty-Third General Meeting of the American Library Association: Held at Waukesha, Wisconsin, July 4-10, 1901
American Library Association; Library science -- Congresses
One list puts into the first primary grade, or fourth year of school,
for children nine or 10 years old, Abbott's "Cyrus," "Darius," "Xerxes,"
and other heroes, and Fiske's "War of independence," all of which are
entirely beyond the grasp of 499 children out of 500 under 12 or 14.
Lists should be shorter, and not too closely divided. A division, "Easy
books," should include whatever children need until they can read
without difficulty, and should contain books like Longman's adapted
stories from the "Blue fairy book" and the earlier volumes of the "Ship"
English history, Baldwin's "Fifty famous stories retold" and
Eggleston's "Great Americans for little Americans."
In one case where books are not classified by grade, Horace Bushnell's
"Woman suffrage," Hinsdale's "President Garfield and education," and
Wright's "Industrial evolution of the United States" are in the same
class with Emilie Poulsson's "Through the farmyard gate," with no
discrimination as to the age for which any one of the four is intended.
Three are beyond the understanding of boys and girls below high school
age, and if in school libraries should be for teachers only, and the
fourth is a book of kindergarten stories.
A book which is often commended by teachers and librarians is Coffin's
"Story of liberty," which I said nearly 20 years ago "is so fierce in
its Protestantism and so bloody in its details that it causes pain to
many a sensitive child." The pictures are too horrible for a child to
see, and the book, like any other which wars against any form of
religious belief, should not be allowed in a public school.
Some lists admit the "Elsie" books, tearfully sentimental and priggish,
where the heroine is held up as a saint and martyr for refusing to obey
an entirely reasonable request of her father, and where money, fine
clothes, and love-making at an early age hold too prominent a place.
In one list, one of Mayne Reid's books is annotated, "To read carefully
any volume of this author is to acquire a considerable knowledge of the
trees, the flowers, the animals, the insects, and the human creatures
existing in the region where the story takes place." In Mayne Reid's
"Desert home" maple sugar trees are tapped in the autumn and yield
nearly a hundred pounds of sugar. Emerson's "Trees and shrubs of
Massachusetts" states that although sap will flow in summer and early
autumn, it has but little saccharine matter. Mayne Reid's stories as
stories are delightful for children to read, but should never be used as
aids to geography lessons.
One library offers its boy-and-girl readers Bushnell's "Moral uses of
dark things," Mrs. Campbell's "Problems of poverty," Ely's "Labor
movement in America" and Shinn's "Mining camps."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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