Coloniality is the epistemic violence that constructs subjectivities (coloniality of being) and knowledge (coloniality of knowledge). We use the concept of coloniality, borrowing it from Anibal Quijano. Coloniality is not the same as colonialism, but a continuation, through the colonialization of the mind and knowledge of its power structures. When we talk about the colonialities that structure arts education discursive practices, we are referring to, for instance: the hegemonic ways through which the child continues to be addressed as a developmental being (learns from the senses, from the simple to the complex, to achieve reason - the adult state as a citizen of the 'nation'); the notion that the child is naturally creative (as is imagined as closer to nature, and thus, to a 'primitive' state); the ways through which, in drawing, for example, the child is said to develop through stages of development (whose rationality is the same of the nineteenth-century recapitulationist rationale); the ways through which 'art' and 'education' continue to enact a paternalism in terms of assuming what is good for the 'Others' (being these 'Others' the child, but also all those that are represented by the power structures as in need to be 'civilized'). Part of the coloniality of arts education practices is also the unquestioned notion of the developmental and creative child as natural and universal. This is the 'white' child that had/has the white, male, European, middle-class, heterosexual, non-disabled adult as a model.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
The book from Wilhelm Viola is about the art education methods of the Austrian Franz Cizek. It starts with the history of ‘child art’ as being the history of the discovery of the child “as a human being with his own personality and his own particular laws”, and the importance of Cizek in perceiving the child’s nature.
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.
