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The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 83

The Library of the Bureau

The Library of the Bureau.

Full justice could not be done to the Bureau without some notice of this department of its work. As one of the fruits of its researches into educational facts and statistics, a library of almost unexampled richness in its special line has gradually grown up beneath its hands. This is, in part, composed of page 14 choice collections bearing on the history and art of education in this country and abroad; in part, of the accumulations made in the process of annual examination into the condition of public-school-instruction, the state of academies and colleges, and the rise and-work of professional and special schools.

For one element of it, there come in, each year, the educational journals of the country, the reports on education from our various States and Territories—including not only those of State-superintendents of instruction, but also those of the superintendents in the counties—and those of the cities and large towns. To these are added the annual reports of high schools, union-schools, preparatory schools, and normal schools; of young ladies' seminaries, business-colleges, agricultural colleges, classical and scientific colleges and universities, with the schools of science, law, medicine, and theology standing connected with these, or apart; while to close the list come schools for orphans, for deaf mutes, for the blind, for youth that need to be reformed as well as taught, for the instruction of a force of well-trained nurses, of apprentices for our marine, and of officers for the Army and Navy of our Government. Collections of school-laws go to fill up the list and aid in the investigation of systems of instruction; while prominent publishers of educational works send in their specimens to show what improvements in the means of teaching are continually going forward.

All these collections are, as fast as time and means permit, so bound, classified, and properly arranged as to be immediately available for any line of educational research to be attempted, whether it refer to the forms of State-and city-systems of instruction or to the condition of academic, collegiate, professional, or special training in any recent period or year.

For another element there are full sets of reports on education from Great Britain and Ireland, Germany, France, Austria, Belgium, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, Sweden and Norway, the British Colonies, Brazil, and the Argentine Republic, while pretty full, though not complete, ones are on hand from Denmark, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Turkey, Russia, Egypt, Chili, Mexico, Ecuador, and the United States of Colombia.

Both these two elements come in with little other expense to the Bureau than the exchange of its own publications with the governments, officers, institutions, and publishing-houses from which they are received.

Then, as a third element, there are, besides encyclopedias for page 15 reference, as large collections as small funds will admit of works relating, in a variety of ways, to the education and civilization of the world, the progress of knowledge, the development of art, and the condition of literature and science.

Works bearing directly on education as a science or an art form a fourth element. Among these may be enumerated: (1) Works of all the prominent German writers on these themes, such as Comenius, Basedow, Pestalozzi, Niemeier, Beneke, Denzel, Graser, Schleiermacher, Herbart, Diesterweg, &c.; (2) all the important works on the history of education in Europe, as well as in the United States; (3) a large number of German, French, and English treatises on educational questions; (4) the chief German, British, Austrian, French, Swiss, and Italian educational periodicals; (5) the many works on special topics in the line of education that have grown out of the controversies, the needs, and the desire for information of the last few years in our own country and abroad.

Those who have had opportunities for comparison of this with kindred libraries abroad do not hesitate to say that, great as are the means for such collections under the monarchies of Europe, this of the Bureau of Education is, for the ground it covers and for purposes of practical investigation, superior to any in existence, except, perhaps, one at Vienna. And of course, as its accumulations are continually going forward and its materials more and more systematized for work, its value as a library of reference increases with each added year.