is our observation that children have, seemingly, a universal vividness of creative
imagination. They make original patterns of play. They do it easily, natively,
not laboriously. However difficult it may be for our mature leaders to develop
original inspirations, the children in whom it is a living process, appear one and
all to possess the creative faculty.

Now if that faculty is so universal in children, and so rare in our mature
leaders, after they have completed their training, where was it lost along the
line? Apparently, it disappeared during the years devoted to education. If
early in life we employ the left arm of original creativeness, where do we become
right handed? Does this left arm-originality-atrophy, through disusc, while wo
concentrate on appropriating the accumulated wisdom of mankind, the truths which
others have discovered and recorded for us merely to perceive and commit to memory?
As we reach out to grasp this recorded lore with the right, does the left hand
lose its cunning? If so, how can education make us more nearly ambidexterous?

How keep learning exact, faithful to the record, disciplined, without too much of
untested and unscientific personal interpretation on the one hand, and on the other
hand still preserve a vivid individualism which continues to explore and invent
originally, and for itself?

Perhaps this isn't a fair indictment of education, stated thus badly. The
laboratory method no doubt is an attempt to force the student's growing knowledgc,
creatively to grapple with life situations. One must admit that creative writing
today is an improvement upon the themes we composed. Art is infinitely more
spontaneous and original than the copying I did as a student. Some forms of
improvising and transposing music are advances in the direction of creative train-
ing. But one must still maintain that there yet remains o vast amount of improve-
ment to be accomplished before education can generally establish itself as an

exercise effectively developing original inventiveness.

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