His
originality lay in the use to which these familiar acquaintances
were put by introduction into an unfamiliar context. The same is
true of every striking scientific discovery, every great
invention, every 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.
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