What is the explanation of this wonder? Mr. Mearns answers that he merely made conditions favorable for full self-expression. There was free appreciation, favorable or unfavorable, of the literature of past and present, no one’s honest judgment being rebuked or authoritatively overridden. There was a cooperative spirit that enabled the pupils to profit from the judgments that they passed upon one another’s productions--criticism did not quench the flame. There was help from the teacher in the way of information about literary technic, and in the way of encouragement to self-respect and self-confidence as well as self-judgment. Individuality, rather than conformity of any kind, received constant applause. This class had its setting in a school that favors just these things. All this Mr. Mearns makes evident, but he insists that these conditions and methods merely clear the way for a creative urge that is present, he is sure, in children and youth generally. He finds that small children make attempts at original creation, but hide the product away, and fail to develop the self-confidence and the practice that alone can bring their original powers to fruitage. The point of all this is the naturalness of free creation of beauty. Man is by nature a creator of beauty! Parallel with Mearns’s book may be placed, as further and possibly equal evidence of creative capacity in the young, the April-May-June, 1926 issue of _Progressive Education_ (Washington, D. C.). It contains many reproductions, mostly in colors, of original pictures made by children. In these child-productions there is vastly more than imitation. One’s breath is taken away again and again, indeed, by the seizure and vivid presentation of what is characteristic in a scene or in a person; or, one is thrilled by the child-artist’s subtle realization of just where lies the beauty of the object represented. As a consequence we have here something beyond mere representation, something more significant than technic learned from a teacher. We find here insight (the product of originality in observation), and self-expression that, being neither conventional nor merely generic but individual, is truly creative.[4] These poems and pictures are, of course, not the average productions of their young authors, and the young authors themselves probably have native talent considerably above the average. We must not make haste to infer that children in general might reach this precise level of performance. Nevertheless, we must not dismiss these unusual productions by merely muttering “IQ.” They are not to be thought of as the work of children who are freaks, or (in the biological sense) sports. This is school work, produced in the ordinary routine of the day. Schools always have had in them pupils whose intelligence-quotient was high, but somehow the schools of yesterday had no such product to show.