CHAPTER XV - Child Art, Continental and English

Abstract

This chapter discusses child art. In the 1912 Education Code's section on Older (than Infant) Scholars, a clear statement was made on the Board's attitude to art teaching in the elementary school. It is called Drawing, but it is amplified to the extent of including modelling. The work is to be directed in the first instance to the cultivation of the scholar's individual faculties of observation and expression, and leading not only to manual dexterity but also to the development of intelligence. From the commencement, the scholar should practice the direct representation of actual objects, natural and artificial, proceeding from simple to complex forms, avoiding the use of flat copies and using the methods and materials, which are most appropriate to each stage and best adapted to sustain his interest and pleasure in the work. Too often, the lessons in art or handwork became an extra period for practical history, geography, or science, when models and other visual material were produced in which the aesthetic factor were or were not involved. The increasing respect for the spontaneous drawing of young children was because of a number of influences. Anthropologists were finding increased interest in the drawings of primitive peoples, both ancient and modern, and if the recapitulation theory was becoming less dogmatically asserted, the academic study of uncivilized drawings gave encouragement to those who found the work of children equally rewarding.