Art Education. Good pictures, well colored, with sufficient vividness to interest the child, abound in the magazines and the shops. The classic nursery rhymes and tales have been illustrated in color by several eminent artists, and copies may be secured through any kindergarten supply house. The little child prefers pictures of animals, children, and mothers with children, realistic or homelike. He is rarely interested in still life, the classic, or the symbolic.
The ambitious teacher can easily overdo the matter of taking children to an art museum. An occasional trip, between five and nine years of age, will do no harm, if they are permitted to wander at their will. It starts the habit of going to a museum. Of greater potency for æsthetic training is the beauty and harmony of the child’s own home, and especially of his own room. Here inexpensive but beautiful colored pictures hung low enough for him to see them easily, and charming little plaster casts, will feed his mind and his soul, as does the daily singing. He is learning that art is for the daily life, not merely for unusual places and occasions as in the museum.
At five or six years of age children may begin to make scrapbooks of beautiful and charming pictures that they find in magazines, or that are purchased through the kindergarten or art stores. Postcard reproductions in color are obtainable of many famous pictures, both classic and nursery subjects.
In art, as in morals, the constructively good will naturally crowd out the crude, the vicious, and the mediocre.
Children’s Drawings and Painting. To quote from Doctor G. Stanley Hall:
Children often like to look at and more or less understand pictures early in the second year. They care most for those that have a story connected with them, and want their pictures read. Children like to draw illustrations of stories and concrete things, which must not be taken away from them in order that they may be precociously taught to see lines only. Instead, therefore, of current methods, the thing for kindergarten and lower grades to draw is the human figure, and vastly more freedom and individuality are needed. Geometrical lines are ghostly and wooden. Things in motion are more interesting, and perhaps Ruskin is right in saying that the child should be limited to the voluntary practice of art. The prevailing methods that begin with mathematical forms, cube, cylinder, etc., are stultifying and not only destroy the natural zest and ability to draw, but take away the power to enjoy art and to understand nature, geography, history, literature, which it is one object of art to inculcate.
The child desires to draw human beings, generally in action. Drawing teachers usually demand complete visual control, but the children draw lines symbolizing the direction birds fly, draw the wind, draw a zigzag line representing the dance a person is engaged in, and even gross errors are repeated after correction and explanation, showing how dominant muscle habits are. Young children draw anything with abandon and pleasure. They do not use their eyes much, no matter how difficult the theme, but draw their own image of it with about as good success as if there were no model. Children care nothing for accuracy here, which is the ideal of the methodists. Their order below ten years of age is the human figure, then animals, plants, or houses, then mechanical inventions, geometrical designs and ornaments. Children’s work is essentially pictorial and not decorative. Thus Ricci declares that art as such to children is unknown. Froebel is wrong, therefore, and the child enters the educational field by the door of literature rather than by that of mathematics.
Always some one or, at most, a few details are focused upon and magnified, betraying just what and how far the child has observed up to date. If we only had a complete collection of all the drawings of a single child with proclivities for art but who had been unrepressed by criticism or derision, we should find its very soul in each developmental stage represented. Too early insistence upon technique crushes. Teachers have so long put form above content that they little suspect the innate power and love of children for this kind of work. Above all, teaching should be to encourage and not to repress the tendency to exaggerate each new trait, and should have regard not to the finished product and should pay little attention to symmetry or to an artistic whole. Uniformity, too, should be cast to the winds and the teacher should encourage the deep instinctive tendency of pupils to perfect each item as it looms into the center of interest.
From several hundred drawings, with the name given them by the child written by the teacher, the chief difference inferred is in concentration. Some make faint, hasty lines, representing all the furniture of a room, or sky and stars, or all the objects they can think of, while others concentrate upon a single object. It is a girl with buttons, a house with a keyhole or steps, a man with a pipe or heels or ring made grotesquely prominent. The development of observation and sense of form is best seen in the pictures of men. The earliest and simplest representation is a round head, two eyes, and legs. Later comes mouth, then nose, then hair, then ears. Arms, like legs, at first, grow directly from the head, rarely from the legs, and are seldom fingerless, though sometimes it is doubtful whether several arms, or fingers, from head and legs without arms, are meant. Of 44 human heads only 9 are in profile. This is one of the many analogies with the rock and cave drawings of primitive man.
The Sunday Supplement. Fortunate the child who is protected from the encroachment of these execrations. They are like the cheap colored candy in the penny shops,—made to sell to those of undeveloped sensibilities, and further dulling those sensibilities to better life. The ordinary Sunday Supplement page for children is a clever combination of all the crudities that children enjoy—vivid color, crude drawing, bad manners, defiance of authority, clownish humor. Of course children cry for it, as they do for drugs that have dulled their nerves and set up perverted tastes. If it is kept from the child until his teens, and meanwhile his taste is being trained by natural, daily means, the probabilities are that he will then find it offensive; at least he will have passed the age when it can pervert his taste and ideals.