TOWNSHIP CENTERS

In some states the traveling librarian assembles the librarians of the traveling libraries of one township or one district and talks to them about books, finds out what they are doing and what they think should be sent to their communities. This led in one township to the books being all sent to the central village and distributed from there to the other communities. There is a reading room and collection of reference books and a head librarian in the central library. There is a local librarian in each of the other communities. The librarian for the branch selects the books for her community from the main collection, with the aid of the head librarian. These books are changed from time to time so that the local collection is kept fresh. They say nearly every one who comes to the village that has the main library visits it, and as this village is the trading centre most of the people in the township come there weekly. This brings the whole township together and, as the minister wrote, "the library in this township is the main occupation now in the evenings and it is bringing about a community spirit." A township clubhouse, where dances and sociables were held, was soon the outcome. This township contains 56 square miles. Many townships are following its lead.

COUNTY LIBRARIES

In large states, county libraries are being established. The smaller the unit the better the work is done, as the people can come more directly and more often in contact with the librarian and the main collection of books.

BOOK WAGONS

In some counties and even in some states book wagons have been routed. These wagons are loaded with books and cover a regular route. Stops are made at farmhouses, where there is much pleasant conversation, and books for each member of the family are chosen and requests made for books to be sent on the next trip. This service has met with much success.

COOPERATION

Large city and town libraries are helping solve the problem of country reading by sending books to small communities immediately surrounding them. The ideal condition is that there shall be a library and reading room within the reach of every citizen, therefore large libraries are being encouraged to so serve villages near them.

The efficiency of traveling libraries when administered by granges called attention to the fact that rural libraries, to accomplish their object should coöperate with other agencies for rural betterment; so traveling librarians began to study these agencies and work through and with them, the state department of agriculture, the state experiment station, the extension department of the state college of agriculture, the grange, the state board of health, and the state department of education.

The teachers' institutes afford a great opportunity for getting in touch with the rural school teachers and farmers' institutes are one of the very best means of reaching country people as a whole as institute workers are very ready to help and anxious to coöperate. The county agricultural agent becomes in many places a real library agent advising and introducing the librarian and seeing that people get the books. So through coöperation the traveling library system develops into a real factor in country life.

Some one has asked the object of all this work.

It is that "each man and woman, boy and girl, shall have his chance and that the state shall maintain a library which can be used by all of the people who desire books for reading or study, for recreation, inspiration or information, and shall offer a library service that shall make it possible for the most remote community, the most isolated workers, to have books to use as freely as they would have if they were living in the city." It is the goal of the library workers in the open country that every man, woman and child in the rural communities shall get the book that is to help them individually, and that the rising generation shall have the reading habit and demand these things for themselves.

THE HOME READING COURSES OF THE UNITED STATES BUREAU OF EDUCATION

BY ELLEN C. LOMBARD, B. S.,

Special Collaborator, United States Bureau of Education.

The Home Reading Courses of the United States Bureau of Education have been established to meet a well-defined need for systematic reading, not only among those familiar with the classics, but among many who have heretofore not had the opportunity to read good books under helpful direction. Through these courses it is hoped that acquaintance with good literature may be promoted.

The great books of literature are those which represent the ideals and tendencies of the people of whom they are written. They are mirrors in which are reflected the thoughts and feelings and aspirations of a race, an age or a civilization. They live through the centuries because they are taken from life.

All people may read the world's greatest literature with pleasure and profit. In some quarters the impression has prevailed that certain books of literature could not be read without the aid of an instructor or, at least, of an outline. It is a fact that so much instruction has sometimes been given about these great books, that a distaste for the books has been created in the readers' minds.

Schools have the best opportunity to create in boys and girls a desire for reading and to teach them to discriminate between good and bad literature. They set the standard. Teachers may so establish the reading habit that boys and girls who leave school at an early age will be satisfied with nothing less than the best literature and will supplement their school work by much reading in after life. More concentrated reading may be done in the home than in the school, where the attention is distracted by recitations and the confusion incident to school-room life.

Thousands of boys and girls are leaving school yearly before they have finished the grammar grades. Thousands of men and women testify to their need of further education. To meet this need the United States Commissioner of Education, Dr. P. P. Claxton, has inaugurated the National Reading Circle.

The plan already includes ten reading courses as follows:

1. Great Literary Bibles.

2. Masterpieces of the World's Literature.

3. Reading Course for Parents.

4. Miscellaneous Course for Boys.

5. Miscellaneous Course for Girls.

6. Thirty Books of Great Fiction.

7. The World's Heroes.

8. American Literature.

9. History.

10. Biography.

Seven courses are now ready for distribution. Courses seven, nine and ten are in preparation at present.

The first two courses include such books as the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Divine Comedy of Dante, the Aeneid of Virgil and the Nibelungenlied. Among the books chosen for parents' reading are a few relating to the physical care of children, their moral and spiritual training and a few books on domestic economy and recent fiction.

The preparation of some of the courses has been in the hands of a committee composed of Professor William Lyon Phelps of Yale University, Professor Charles Alphonso Smith of the University of Virginia, Professor Charles Forster Smith of the University of Wisconsin and Professor Richard Burton of the University of Minnesota.

A course in United States history is now in preparation. The committee working on this course in coöperation with the Bureau of Education consists of Professor William Starr Myers of Princeton University, Professor Wilbur F. Gordy of Hartford, Conn., Professor Franklin L. Riley of the Washington and Lee University and Professor William H. Mace of Syracuse University.

Over three thousand men, women, boys and girls have enrolled in the National Reading Circle and are reading the books selected for the courses. The readers represent all walks of life-school principals, teachers, students, business men and women, physicians, lawyers, ministers, librarians. School principals, teachers and librarians are assisting by forming small circles for reading. Housewives are forming reading circles among their neighbors.

The requirements are simple. Each reader is asked to send to the Bureau of Education a notification when each book is begun and finished, and to send a summary of every book read. All courses are to be read once, at least, except the first course which is to be read twice.

When a course is completed, test questions are sent to the reader. When these are answered satisfactorily, a certificate, signed by the Commissioner of Education, is given.

State library commissions and traveling library commissions are giving their aid, placing the books at the disposal of the readers. Local libraries are coöperating by placing the books in the courses on the shelves. Library officials in all parts of the country report that the demand for serious books of this sort has never been so insistent as at the present time.

Upon application to the Home Education Division, U. S. Bureau of Education, Washington, D. C., full information and the reading courses will be sent.

In

It is difficult to measure the full extent of this new work. addition to the large number of persons already on the rolls of the bureau who are taking the courses regularly, there are many others who have been stimulated directly or indirectly by the bureau's efforts to give national attention to the importance of better reading. In this respect the reading courses are but one of a number of evidences of the federal government's newly awakened interest in the long-neglected field of home education.