The Child Study movement, in the United States and Europe, was based on intensive observations of children and their performances (drawings being used as raw material to be interpreted and analyzed) in psychological laboratories, in classrooms, at home, in the playground, or in questionnaires that generated data about who was the child and who should the child become.
The idea that children are innate artists, and that artists should attain a childish state, is historically rooted around the notion of development. At the same time, those patterns of development through fixed stages in drawings, work as a contradiction within the educational discourses, being the naturally creative child that child who is framed by a knowledge that creates stable and predictable representations of what she should be at each point of her growth [ see child development, stages of development in the Glossary].
Narratives of childhood as a stage of life not only provided a representation of the present but also the possibility to control what was yet-to-come. This control embodied a particular comparative thought in which time played the role of regularizing all domains and stages of life portending the future as the hope of progress and, simultaneously, the fear of decay if the present was not properly governed.
The making of collections of drawings and their interpretation by psychologists and educationalists made these collections as straightening devices [see the Glossary] in terms of what the child was and should be as a developing child. Children’s drawings were mobilized as ‘raw’ data in the production of knowledge about what the child was and should become. These collections of drawings as ‘raw’ material were actors in the making of the developing child. They allowed for the demarcation of a normal childhood and its ‘Others’. As such, children’s graphic marks were normalized as a common property that should define the expected ‘normal’ child. The natural creative and imaginative child was tamed by her own fate: to develop.
C.M.