1895 - Studies of Childhood (James Sully)

James Sully was an English psychologist of the Child Study Movement. This book results from articles and essays published before 1895 in magazines. Sully starts to recognize his debt to some scholars who put the study of the child on the agenda of psycho-education, like William Preyer. He also thanks General Pitt Rivers and H. Balfour of the Museum of Oxford for making possible "studying the drawings of savages" and to the art educator Ebenezer Cooke for his help on children's modes of drawing. Indeed, the book reserves three chapters to study children's imagination, art production, and development through drawing. He says one thing that seems to be certain about child's nature is that it is "fancy-full." Childhood, Sully continues, "we all know, is the age for dreaming, for decking out the world as yet unknown with the gay colors of imagination; for living a life of play or happy make-believe." However, studying the child's mind was necessary to better understand the child's imagination, as "the play of the infantile imagination is probably much less uniform than is often supposed". Throughout the book, James Sully activates the primitivism view of the child and the developmental rationale.
"Our modern science is before all things historical and genetic, going back to beginnings so as to understand the later and more complex phases of things as the outcome of these beginnings. The same kind of curiosity which prompts the geologist to get back to the first stages in the building up of the planet, or the biologist to search out the pristine forms of life, is beginning to urge the student of man to discover by a careful study of fancy the way in which the human life begins to take its characteristic forms".
Not only Sully approaches the simplicity of the child's mind to the mind of the 'primitive', but also the 'myth-making' and play as proper of the child and 'primitive's' raw nature. In the chapter The Young Draughtsman, for instance, he gives a detailed study of the successful progress of children in drawing, situating the performance at an age level and comparing with drawings from non-European peoples. The epistemological eye that gives sense to this equivalence is constituted within the recapitulationist theories and a notion of history through the arrow of time (past, present, and future). The child was said to be the human race's past and the symbol of its future.
"We shall therefore study children's drawings as rude embryonic art. In doing this, our special aim will be to describe and explain childish characteristics. This, again, will compel us to go to some extent into the early forms of observation and imagination.It will be found, I think that the first crude drawings are valuable as throwing light on the workings of children's minds. [...] In carrying out our investigation of children's drawings, we shall need to make a somewhat full reference to the related phenomena, the drawings of modern savages and those of early art."
The equivalence was fabricated as visual affinities between ones and the others. It is important to stress that the affinities were constructions, not simply descriptions. The affinities needed the rationale of the 'family' of scribbles and traces. However, the child being described by Sully is the 'white' child. This child would progress and distance herself from her 'primitive' counterpart.

CM