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 department of circulation, will be expended
to greater advantage than many times the amount devoted to a large number
of small collections on the same subjects in schools.

These are the considerations that have governed the New York Public
Library in its effort to be of assistance to the teachers and pupils in
the public schools of the city. Stated formally, these efforts manifest
themselves in the following directions:

(1) The making of library use continuous from the earliest possible age,