Dr. Dora Smith is a professor of English at the University of Minnesota in the United States. Her institution has sent her on an exploratory journey to the Far and Near East to search out and collect the literary heritage of children. She visited The Woman's Voice during her passage through Beirut and gave a delightful interview about her educational mission... How, do you suppose, will she compare the literary heritage for children that we have with theirs?!
Dr. Dora Smith talking to the editor-in-chief about her mission in the East
"It is the duty of the language teacher to be acquainted with everything his children read — to know their books. Children's books are expected to open before the small reader many windows through which he may look out on the world and understand it as it really is, not merely as the old fables have pictured it.
"Our children in America are ignorant of a great deal about the children of the world. For the books in their hands do not give them a true picture of the life of this age. In the American's imagination the Arab is
a naked barbarian who lives in tents! My task here is to gather the children's books in your possession, send them to the University of Minnesota, and look into the possibility of translating the good ones into English."
This is the substance of what Dr. Dora Smith opened with. She began her journey last June and will finish it next June. The first stage was Honolulu in the Hawaiian Islands, then Japan, Hong Kong, then the Philippines, Singapore, Bali, and Java, Thailand, India, Pakistan. She is now in Lebanon, and from here
she goes to Egypt, then Jordan, Turkey, Greece, Italy, Spain, and Britain.
A long journey, as we see; and whenever she sets down her baggage in a country she proceeds to collect its children's books from their likely sources and send them to the University of Minnesota, where they have 250 foreign students belonging to the various countries of the Far and Near East whose help can be enlisted in studying these books and appraising their educational value.
"In America," says Dr. Smith, "we have sixty publishing houses that assign an editor to children's books who concerns himself with nothing else — and one book out of every four published in the United States is a children's book — and so we see that picture stories play a great and important role in our lives, and it is our duty to prepare faithfully for this role..."
When she was asked what results she had found on her journey
In our little ones there is a longing to know the children of the world!