Child Development

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".

In this article, Thomas Munro (curator of Education for the Cleveland Museum of Art from 1931-67) seeks to reflect on the possibilities of education in museums in the face of a new idea of childhood. The child Munro talks about is a curious, creative child who should not be subjected to tedious educational practices, capable of destroying her childlike nature. Munro considers that if it is necessary to think about how to make the child love a museum, then something needs to be fixed with art museums, not with the child.

The text deals with the making of the developmental child through drawing. By the end of the 19th century, psychologists and educators started collecting children's drawings as 'data' that could provide knowledge on the child's mind development. These drawings created a way of reasoning about the productions of children as mirroring their mind, as well as expectations and images about the normal and the 'abnormal' childhood.

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The text looks at some metaphors used in arts education discourses, namely the metaphor of the child as a seed and as a plant, and of the educator as a gardener, whose function would be to conduct, without disturbing, the child's growth. These practices are contradictory and carry various types of violence, whether in the ways of imagining a universal child (having the subject European, adult, male, 'white', non-disabled, as a becoming) from developmentalist perspectives, or in the hope of their future.

This article from Louise Maitland is based on comparing the western child with the ‘primitive’. The illustrations in the article are “traced copies of the original drawings”. Maitland affirms what, by the end of the 19th century, became a common argument among western ‘white’ educators, psychologists, and art educators: “On comparing the drawings of primitive races with those of children, we find that they possess many points of interest in common.

First published in 1875/6 in Switzerland, Johannes Staub’s picture book series A instrucção da creança was translated and published in Portugal in 1904/5. Staub was a teacher and author, committed to progressive and reform education. His picture book series was thought as part of the pedagogical method of the object lesson.

This is a text from a conference given at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris by Ernest Hamy, who was the first director of the Ethnographic Museum of Trocadéro. Hamy's thought dwells on the comparison of children's drawings and 'savage' drawings. 

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.

This exhibition, 'Month of Children and Madmen', was organized in 1933 by Osório César and Flávio de Carvalho at the Club of Modern Art in São Paulo, Brazil. In an article published in the magazine Rumo, Flávio de Carvalho stated that "children's drawings, when teachers do not stupidly control them, have an importance that we still do not know in all its scope. They bring to our reflection the force of the primitive man [...]. The drawings of mad persons give us the path to find the genesis of the torture that shakes the soul of the insane.