This text is part of Munro's intervention at a Western Arts Association conference in the United States. He starts addressing the audience with a brief account of the steps made in recent years in American art education. The most important, Munro argues, was the recognition of the arts as a subject in the curriculum. Moreover, with this, a process of transformation of the teaching methods, from the "literal copying of the model, for the right of the artist and the art student to transform what he sees in accordance with some feeling or decorative idea of his own". Saying this did not mean that Thomas Munro considered that the battle was won.
On the contrary, he argued that art teaching was still "too standardized". The battle was too hard, he admitted. There were pressures from the directions of the schools, the cities, and the families. It was a battle of 'tastes'. The frightening question for teachers: "Is that what you are teaching our children?"
However, Munro was confident of the approach: to develop the child's creativity and make contact with works of art possible. How many art teachers had contact with various original art works? "How many teachers are really familiar with the work of Cézanne, Renoir, Picasso, and Matisse?"
His purpose was not to blame the teachers but to ask for better materials, images and reproductions in schools. He gave the examples of Austria and Germany, whose better machine printing methods he praised. Nevertheless, it also put a responsibility on teachers to ask the companies to print works with aesthetically quality.
"There should be a demand expressed to these companies for better prints, and then we could make much more use of them"
Munro ends the talk underlining the need to put the child in touch with the artworks of the old masters. Only then, he said, "creativeness can be developed".
CM