I practiced this art formally as a teacher for twelve years and as a bookseller for twelve additional years, but it has been a very great pleasure in the rest of my life. It involves putting yourself in the other's place and seeing from that standpoint, knowing a wide range of books, and being able to pick out just the right one. That is to say, it's an act of love.
Here is an excellent children's librarian, Anne Thaxter Eaton, writing in her book, “Reading with Children,” 1940, on bringing children and books together:
It's
not a simple task. It means knowing children and knowing books so
thoroughly that we may help the dreamer see the wonder and romance of
the world around him, and the matter of fact child to enter the realm
of imaginative literature...we must have retained or we must
recapture for ourselves something of the child's own attitude toward
life and the world.
There seems to be a lot of luck involved sometimes, too, in the giving of just the right book and, dare I say it, possibly even promptings from the angels or guardian spirits or something like that. My own experience is that the recipient rarely realizes fully all that goes behind your giving of the right book.
If good bookgiving is similar to good teaching, as I think it obviously is, this fact surely makes “standards in education,” test scores, grade-point averages – I have seen grade-point averages carried out to five decimal places – completely counterproductive. Teacher evaluations which are based on student scores on standardized tests become the demons' own handiwork, the very opposite of a good measure of true teaching. If standardized tests measure anything, they measure lack of individuation! And, of course, un-individuated recipients of books and teaching think that standardized stuff is what real education is all about, and evaluate their teachers accordingly.
It's not a simple task, as Eaton says, but it certainly is a joyful thing when you are allowed to do it and you get it right.
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