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 on the
subjects of instruction. The general collection of books should be outside
of the school, because the boy is destined to spend most of his life
outside of the school. His education by no means ends with his graduation.
The agents that operate to develop and change him will be at work so long
as he lives, and it is desirable that the book should be one of these. If
he says good-by to the book when he leaves school, that part of his
training is likely to be at an end. If he uses, in connection with, and
parallel to, his formal education a general collection of books outside of
the school, he will continue to use it after he leaves school. And even so
far as the special classroom library is concerned, it must be evident that
a large general collection of books that may be drawn upon freely is a
useful supplement. For the teacher's professional use, the larger the
collection at his disposal the better. A sum of money spent by the city in
improving and making adequate the pedagogical section of its public
library, particularly in the depart