The remark was made, a little way back, that fellowship with children produces respect for their native qualities. Some evidence of the correctness or incorrectness of this statement ought to be discoverable in the attitudes of teachers and in the practices of schools. The teacher becomes acquainted with many children of different types; is less liable than a parent to be swayed by emotions that deflect the judgment; is in a situation that calls for professional study and attitudes in the matter. The trained teachers, then, and the schools that make the largest study of the problems of education may be expected to accumulate experience and views that have some significance. Now, it is safe to say that today no school that is modern or even intelligently managed is conducted upon the assumption that children at any age are merely instinctive creatures. Moreover, in the schools in which experimentation is most free and pervasive, you will find an abounding belief in children, and no spirit of disillusionment with respect to adults. You will find criticism of adult society, great dissatisfaction with it, to be sure; but on what ground? On the ground that the traditional, conventional treatment of the young represses, retards, covers up, and thus defeats the splendid capacities that are within us. It is noteworthy that the schools and schoolmen who make this charge do thereby place themselves under obligation to make a concrete showing of what can be done by better education. What happens when schooling is guided by this glowing faith in man? Does the faith grow brighter and brighter, or does it check itself by its own failure to work? It is my opinion that the actualities of human nature are receiving more illumination at the present moment in the experimental schools than anywhere else. Let us take a glance or two, then, in this direction. XIII CAPACITIES REVEALED BY NEW TYPES OF EDUCATION The same two decades that showered us with mental tests witnessed also the upspringing of many schools that are variously designated by such terms as “modern,” “experimental,” and “creative activity.” Creative activity, as a description of what pupils do when they are at school, is an arresting notion. It obviously assumes with respect to pupils’ capacities something different from popular thought about them, and different, too, from the traditions of the schoolmaster. The school policy that it connotes includes provision for an unprecedented degree of both negative freedom (absence of compulsion) and positive freedom (abundance of materials with which to work and natural situations to be met by the pupils’ own initiative). Observation of pupils placed in conditions thus favorable for the showing out of what is in them may be expected to throw light upon the motives and the capacities of human beings.