Children's Drawings

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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From the 1870s onwards, children’s drawings started to be systematically collected and analyzed by child psychologists to study the child’s mental growth process. Drawing as an instrument to study the child’s mind soon created an equivalence between what the child was (the drawings mirroring her mental processes) and what she should become. By the end of the 19th century, Corrado Ricci, in Italy, collected more than one thousand drawings.

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 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.

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.