Again, a boy, full of the possibilities that would lead him to appreciate the best in literature, has gained his knowledge of it from a teacher who looks upon a literary masterpiece only as something to be dissected.  The student has been disgusted instead of inspired, and his whole life has been deprived of one of the purest and most uplifting of all influences.  Had he been brought up in a library where he could make literary friends and develop literary enthusiasms, his course with the dry as dust teacher would have been only an unpleasant incident, instead of the wrecking of a part of his intellectual life.

Still again, a boy on a farm has vague aspirations.  He knows that he wants a broader horizon, to get away from his cramped environment—­that is about all.  How many boys, impelled by such feelings, have gone out into the world with no clear idea of what they are fitted to do, or even what they really desire!  To how many others has the companionship of a few books meant the opening of a peep-hole, thru which, dimly perhaps, but none the less really, have been descried definite possibilities, needs, and opportunities!

To all of these youths books have been selective aids merely—­they have added little or nothing to the actual training whose extent and character they have served to point out.  Such cases, which it would be easy to multiply, illustrate the value of books in the selective functions of training.  To assert that they exercise such a function is only another way of saying that a mind orients itself by the widest contact with other minds.  There are other ways of assuring this contact, and these should not be neglected; but only thru books can it approach universality both in space and in time.  How else could we know exactly what Homer and St. Augustine and Descartes thought and what Tolstoi and Lord Kelvin and William James, we will say, are even now thinking?

It has scarcely been necessary to say all this to convince you of the value of books as aids to education; but it is certainly interesting to find that in an examination of the selective processes in education, we meet with our old friends in such an important role.

A general collection of books, then, constitutes an important factor in the selective part of an education.  Where shall we place this collection?  I venture to say that altho every school must have a library to aid in the formative part of its training, the library as a selective aid should be large and central and should preferably be at the disposal of the student not only during the period of his formal training, but before and after it.  This points to the public library, and to close cooperation between it and the school, rather than to the expansion of the classroom library.  This is, perhaps, not the place to dispute the wisdom of our Board of Education in developing classroom libraries, but it may be proper to put in a plea for confining them to books that bear more particularly