The Significance of the Junior College Library in My Educational Program

A Y DISCUSSION of " s i g n i f i c a n c e " in • connection with libraries or with the profession of teaching demands a definition of that much-abused word. I have a strong feeling that the word has become a little parcel of jargon in the world of education, where words usually lose more sense than they gain with the passage of seminars, conferences, and conventions. Strictly, a significant object or institution is one which betokens an essential meaning; it is a symbol of a basic ideal, an embodiment of an influential value. T o me, as a teacher or as an everyday citizen, any library means a house of knowledge, a place of experiments among knowledges, an available source of what past minds have thought and present minds remember. Indeed, any fairly precise statement of the significance of the library requires of the teacher an equally precise statement of his philosophy of teaching. For surely the teacher must depend on the library as the merchant depends on his storehouse. T h e teacher must perceive, I feel quite sure, that he is a clerk and guide to minds that have come out of the past and that must, to live quite happily, be restored to i t — restored to it in the sense of being made aware of the extent and richness of our cultural heritage, restored by means of such tools as expert reading, precise oral and written expression, restored, as a consequence, to a pattern of spirit designed by the great minds of the past. N o teacher, of course, ever achieves this end. But he must make his way, if ever so slightly, toward it. He must think out practical means of exposing student mind to cultural heritage. He must gratefully adopt, or resolutely reject, past teaching methods. His only method can be, at last, in spite of all the fine textbooks on the subject, the result of his ingenuity and his understanding of the separate needs and hungers and dislikes and indifferences of the willing, or unwilling, minds that challenge positive achievement.