uine meaning is in the propulsion it affords
toward a higher level. It is just something to do with. Appealing to the
interest upon the present plane means excitation; it means playing with
a power so as continually to stir it up without directing it toward
definite achievement. Continuous initiation, continuous starting of
activities that do not arrive, is, for all practical purposes, as bad
as the continual repression of initiative in conformity with supposed
interests of some more perfect thought or will. It is as if the child
were forever tasting and never eating; always having his palate tickled
upon the emotional side, but never getting the organic satisfaction that
comes only with digestion of food and transformation of it into working
power.

As against such a view, the subject-matter of science and history and
art serves to reveal the real child to us. We do not know the meaning
either of his tendencies or of his performances excepting as we take
them as germinating seed, or opening bud, of some fruit to be borne. The
whole world of visual nature is all too small an answer to the problem
of the meaning of the child's instinct for light and form. The entire
science of physics is none too much to interpret adequately to us what
is involved in some simple demand of the child for explanation of some
casual change that has attracted his attention. The art of Raphael or of
Corot is none too much to enable us to value the impulses stirring in
the child when he draws and daubs.

So much for the use of the subject-matter in interpretation. Its further
employment in direction or guidance is but an expansion of the same
thought. To interpret the fact is to see it in its vital movement, to
see it in its relation to growth. But to view it as a part of a normal
growth is to secure the basis for guiding it. Guidance is not external
imposition. _It is freeing the life-process for its own most adequate
fulfilment._ What was said about disregard of the child's present
experience because of its remoteness from mature experience; and of the
sentimental idealization of the child's naive caprices and performances,
may be repeated here with slightly altered phrase. There are those who
see no alternative between forcing the child from without, or leaving
him entirely alone. Seeing no alternative, some choose one mode, some
another. Both fall into the same fundamental error. Both fail to see
that development is a definite process, hav