The notion that children 'develop' is a modern notion through an idea of time towards a future. This temporality takes development and progress (of children, of humanity, and the nation; see [[recapitulation theory]]) as inevitable. The modern conceptualization of history as past, present, and future was based on an arrow of time, in which the past represented the less developed and the future represented the further developed. The new sciences of education that emerged during the 19th century took this evolutionist rationale to think about the child. Development was one of the technologies used to construct the 'white', male child as natural and universal. Developmentalism is thus the rationale that separates the child from the adult based on binary oppositions such as nature/civilization. The child, as close to [[nature]], and thus to 'origin', made the senses (see [[education of the senses]]) and their taming as the raw material of education. Modern progressive arts education was based on this notion that, again, separated the child (as nature) from the adult (as reasoning).
R.R. Tomlinson was a Senior Inspector of Art to the London County Council. The book was published in 1947, and the author starts by saying that the book's title would have been facetious one generation ago. He was referring to how most adults, even art educators, would have received children’s drawings and paints.
James Sully was an English psychologist of the Child Study Movement. This book results from articles and essays published before 1895 in magazines. Sully starts to recognize his debt to some scholars who put the study of the child on the agenda of psycho-education, like William Preyer. He also thanks General Pitt Rivers and H. Balfour of the Museum of Oxford for making possible "studying the drawings of savages" and to the art educator Ebenezer Cooke for his help on children's modes of drawing.
First published in 1943, Education through Art by Herbert Read is still considered one of the urtexts of arts education today. The text was translated into several languages and influenced arts education practices in many contexts.
