Please read: Wolukau-Wanambwa, E. (2018). Margaret Trowell’s School of Art or How to Keep the Children’s Work Really African. In A. M. Kraehe, B. S. Carpenter, & R. A. Gaztambide-Fernández (Eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Race and the Arts in Education (pp. 85–101). Palgrave Macmillan.
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 words sound wrong, somehow, like 'baking ices', 'polishing mud' or 'sliced lemonade'. This was the way Roger Fry started the text on Teaching Art. 'Art Teachers' seemed to sound also wrong, and yet, he vented, large amounts of money were being spent in 'breeding' the type. "What has been overlooked is the fact that Art cannot, properly speaking, be taught at all". The canons, the conventions, and historical facts could be taught, but "one cannot teach a thing which does not exist". The text argues against the possibility of teaching the intuitive powers of creation.
This text from the English art critic Roger Fry was published in 1917 in Burlington Magazine to publicize the exhibition at the Omega Workshops. Fry draws the equivalence of the child with the so-called 'primitive' and the loss of those qualities by the 'civilized' child once submitted to schooling practices.
Marion Richardson was an English art teacher whose work became well-known close to the names of Franz Cizek or Victor Lowenfeld. In the United Kingdom, Roger Fry often referred to the importance of Marion Richardson's work at the Dudley High School for progressive arts education practices, as Richardson refers to Fry's Omega Workshops. This book contains the memories of Richardson as a teacher and her views on child art. Richardson believed children were creative and had to be taught to trust their inner eye.
The different ways in which imagination was spoken of in the educational field were shrouded in ambiguities. Sometimes welcomed and desired, sometimes feared for the troubles it might cause to the production of the child as a future citizen. The discourse unfolded, identifying nuances in these ambiguities and anxieties, above all through the lines drawn between good and evil imaginations. The imaginative child as a kind of person was already a reality, with more than one way to be lived.
Katherine Ball was the Director of art in public schools in San Francisco. In this article, the naturalization of the child as an artist is evidenced, but not a given. The value of arts education was not to produce artists but rather "to give a training designed to develop the faculties of observation, imagination and graphic expression".
We highlight some of the passages in the text:
This book was published in 1936 by Wilhelm Viola and contains a forward by R. R. Tomlinson, author of the book Children as Artists. Viola was one of the voices that most spread Cizek's work in the English-speaking world. In this book, he began by explaining what could be understood by child art.
