efforts may place in his hands a book that will simply discourage and
ultimately repel him, sending him to join the army of those to whom no
books appeal.

Next we find those who understand how to read and to read with ease, but
to whom books--at any rate certain classes of books--are not interesting.
Now interest in a subject may be so great that one will wade through the
driest literature about it, but such interest belongs to the few--not to
the many. I have come to the conclusion that more readers have had their
interest killed or lessened by books than have had it aroused or
stimulated. This is a proportion that it is our business as librarians to
reverse. More of this unfortunate and heart-breaking, interest-killing
work than I like to think of goes on in school. Not necessarily; for the
name of those is legion who have had their eyes opened to the beauties of
literature by good teachers. This makes it all the more maddening when we
think how many poor teachers, or good teachers with mistaken methods, or
indifferent teachers, have succeeded in associating with books in the
minds of their pupils simply burdensome tasks--the gloom and heaviness of
life rather than its joy and lightness. Such boys and girls will no more
touch a book after leaving school than you or I would touch a scorpion
after one had stung us.

Perhaps it is useless to try to change this; possibly it is none of our
business, though we have already seen that there are reasons to the
contrary. But we can better matters, and we are daily bettering them, by
our work with children. If a child has once learned to love books and to
associate them powerfully with something else than a burdensome task, then
the labors of the unskillful teachers will create no dislike of the book
but only of the teacher and his methods; while those of the good teacher
will be a thousand times more fruitful than otherwise.