admirable artistic production. Only silly folk identify creative
originality with the extraordinary and fanciful; others recognize
that its measure lies in putting everyday things to uses which had not
occurred to others. The operation is novel, not the materials out of
which it is constructed.

The educational conclusion which follows is that all thinking is
original in a projection of considerations which have not been
previously apprehended. The child of three who discovers what can be
done with blocks, or of six who finds out what he can make by putting
five cents and five cents together, is really a discoverer, even though
everybody else in the world knows it. There is a genuine increment of
experience; not another item mechanically added on, but enrichment by a
new quality. The charm which the spontaneity of little children has
for sympathetic observers is due to perception of this intellectual
originality. The joy which children themselves experience is the joy of
intellectual constructiveness--of creativeness, if the word may be used
without misunderstanding. The educational moral I am chiefly concerned
to draw is not, however, that teachers would find their own work less of
a grind and strain if school conditions favored learning in the sense
of discovery and not in that of storing away what others pour into
them; nor that it would be possible to give even children and youth the
delights of personal intellectual productiveness--true and important
as are these things. It is that no thought, no idea, can possibly be
conveyed as an idea from one person to another. When it is told, it
is, to the one to whom it is told, another given fact, not an idea. The
communication may stimulate the other person to realize the question for
himself and to think out a like idea, or it may smother his intellectual
interest and suppress his dawning effort at thought. But what he
directly gets cannot be an idea. Only by wrestling with the conditions
of the problem at first hand, seeking and finding his own way out, does
he think. When the parent or teacher has provided the conditions which
stimulate thinking and has taken a sympathetic attitude toward the
activities of the learner by entering into a common or conjoint
experience, all has been done which a second party can do to instigate
learning. The rest lies with the one directly concerned. If he
cannot devise his own solution (not of course in isolation, but in
correspondence wi