To make good books available to all children of a community.
To train boys and girls to use with discrimination the adult library.
To reinforce and supplement the class work of the city schools (public,private,parochial and "Sunday"schools).
To cooperate with institutions for civic and social betterment,such as playgrounds,settlements,missions,boys'and girls'
clubs;and with commercial institutions employing boys and girls,such as factories,postoffice special delivery division,telegraph and telephone agencies and department stores.
And first and last to build character and develop literary taste through the medium of books and the influence of the children's librarian.
Pursuing these purposes,endeavoring to meet these tests.library work with children will make for better citizenship.It will take account not only of the children of the poor,but of the children of the well-to-do,who may need that influence even more.In the cities,which now overshadow our national life,there are no longer homes;there are flats,where the boys and girls are tolerated--perhaps.
"Our problem is not the bad boy,but rather the modern city,"says Prof.Allen Hoben."The normal boy has come honestly by his love of adventure,his motor propensities and his gang instincts.
It is when you take this healthy biological product and set him down in the midst of city restrictions that serious trouble ensues.For the city has been built for economic convenience,and with little thought for human welfare.Industrial aim is evidenced to every sense.You smell industrialism in the far-reaching odors of the stockyards.You hear it in the roar of the elevated hard by the windows of the poor.You see it in a water front that people cannot use,and you touch it in the fleck of soot that is usually on your nose.The proof of industrial aggression ceases to be humorous,however,when it shows itself in the small living quarters of many a city flat where boys are supposed to find the equivalent of the old-time house.
Constituted as he is,the boy cannot but be a nuisance in the flat community.And because the flat dweller moves frequently,he will be without those real neighbors of long standing whose leniency formerly robbed the law of its victims.Furthermore,he has no particular quarters of his own where he may satisfy his sense of proprietorship and save up the numerous things he collects with a view to using them in construction.The flat dwellers will not permit the noise or litter incident to such building as a boy likes;and he has little if any part in the labor of conducting the house.He loses dignity as a helpful and necessary member of the family,he loses that loyalty which attaches to the old familiar places of boyhood experience and strengthens many a man to-day,making him more kind and consistent in his living by virtue of homestead memories."So the boy is driven to the street as his domain.It is his playground.And here he encounters the policeman.Of 717children arrested in one month in New York City,more than half were arrested for playing games.Parenthetically,the fact may be quoted that in this children's chief playground in a period of ten months 67children were killed and 196injured.
Unerringly,these facts point to a union of social forces--the children's library and the children's playground,a realization of that clear comprehension which the ancient Greeks had of the unity between the body and the mind.Quoting Plato:"If children are trained to submit to laws in their plays'the love of law enters their souls with the music accompanying their games,never leaves them,and helps them in their development."Having in thought physical recreation as a stimulus to mental development,in combination bringing home the joyousness of life,an ideal union of forces is being effected in some of the larger cities.In some places,the movement has assumed but an initial stage--a bit of tent shelter for distribution of books to children gathered at the sand pile.In some instances co-operation has joined the work of park breathing centers and library organizations.This has reached completed form in the placement of branch libraries as part of the park equipment,either quarters within a general building,or a separate little building adjacent to or on the athletic field.
But whether in place of high or low degree;whether in rented store or memorial building of monumental type;whether in the rooms of a school building or a corner in a factory;whether by this method or by that,the children's librarian employs the printed page to serve as instrument to these ends:
The building of character,making for the best in citizenship.
The enlargement of narrow lives,bringing the joy and savour and beauty of life to the individual.
The opening of opportunity to all alike,which is the essence of democracy.
