He is keenly interested in games, whether they are games of physical skill, of mental skill, or games of pretence.  Here most especially he comes into contact with other people, and here he realises some of the experiences of social life.

Such are the most usual sides of life sought by the ordinary child, and on such must we base the surroundings we provide for our children in school, and the aspects of life to which we introduce them, commonly called subjects of the curriculum.

Our third principle is therefore, evident:  we find, in the child’s spontaneous choice, the nature of the surroundings and of the activities that he craves for; in other words, he makes his own curriculum and selects his own subject matter.

The next consideration is the atmosphere in which a child can best develop character by means of these experiences.  A young child is a stranger in an unknown, untried country:  he has many strange promptings that seek for satisfaction; he has strong emotions arising from his instincts, he feels crudely and fiercely and he must act without delay, as a result of these emotions.  He is like a tourist in a new strange country, fresh and eager, and with a similar holiday spirit of adventure:  the stimulation of the new arouses a desire to interpret, to investigate and to ask questions:  it arouses strong emotions to like or dislike, to fear, to be curious; it leads to certain modes of conduct, as a result of these emotions.  Picture such a young tourist buttonholed by a blase guide, who had forgotten what first impressions meant, who insisted on accompanying him wherever he went, regulating his procedure by telling him just what should be observed and how to do so, pouring out information so premature as to be obnoxious, correcting his taste, subduing his enthusiasm, and modifying even his behaviour.  The tourist would presumably pay off the unwelcome guide, but the children cannot pay off the teacher:  they can and do rebel, but docility and adaptability seem to play a large part in self-preservation.  For the young child freedom must precede docility, because the only reasonable and profitable docility is one that comes after initiative and experiment have been satisfied, and when the child feels that he needs help.

The world that the free child chooses represents every side of life that he is ready to assimilate, and his freedom must be intellectual, emotional and moral freedom.  In the school with the rigidly organised time-table, where the remarks of the children provoke the constantly repeated reproach:  “We are not talking of that just now,” where the apparatus is formal and the method of using it prescribed, where home life and street life are ignored, where there are neither garden nor picture books, where childish questions are passed over or hastily answered, where the room is full of desks and the normal attitude is sitting, where the teacher is teaching more often than the children are doing, there is no intellectual freedom.