1883 - The Contents of Children's Minds (G. Stanley Hall)

This book reports a study inspired by a survey that had taken place in Berlin, in 1869, about what children knew when entering schools. Stanley Hall, the North American educationalist of the Child Study Movement, decided to apply the same experiment in Boston, USA, in 1880. For that, “a list of questions suitable for obtaining an inventory of the contents of the minds of children of average intelligence on entering the primary schools of that city” was prepared. The study aligns with the emergence and proliferation of statistical reasoning to produce knowledge about several objects, children included. The drawing was one of the instruments mobilized for fabricating ‘data.’ From several hundred drawings, it was possible to establish some patterns and provide the readers with knowledge about children's minds and their development. This study provides one of the first descriptions of child development according to an idea of stages of development through graphic registers. To the American educationalist, the earliest and simplest representation made by the child was

“a round head, two eyes and legs. Later comes mouth, then nose, then hair, then ears. Arms like legs 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 main analogies with the rock and cave drawings. […] Last, as least mobile and thus attracting least attention, comes the body; first round like the head, then elongated, sometimes prodigiously, and sometimes articulated into several compartments, and in three cases divided, the upper part of the figure being in one place and the lower in another. The mind, and not the eye alone, is addressed, for the body is drawn and then the clothes are drawn on it (as the child dresses), diaphanous and only in outline. Most draw living objects except the kindergarten children, who draw their patterns. […] The very earliest pencillings, commonly of three-year-old children, are mere marks to and fro, often nearly in the same line”.

A particular image of how the ‘right’ child would develop is traced from here. This was one of the first conceptualizations of the child’s stages of development in drawing through the linearity of time. It provided a ‘map’ that ordered, through psychological lenses, the well-developed child and her stair-case progress.

CM