Self-Government

The text problematizes the making of the student as a creative and entrepreneurial subject in contemporary times. It argues that creativity is being instrumentalized as a technology of government. In a way, it takes governmentality as a way to analyze how this fabrication of a human kind is inscribed in older technologies for the government of the subject since modernity, particularly through the reactivation of a pastoral and confessional power.

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.

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. 

The Juvenile Art Classes opened in 1897 in Austria and lasted until the 1930s. The program of the classes was: "Let the children grow, develop and mature". Through William Viola's books on Cizek's methods, we learn about his practices and praise of what he considered the natural creative child. Just for the 'slogan' of the classes, we can see how the gardening practices of education informed his thought. Cizek was a traveling author through the works of art educators like Marion Richardson, R. R. Tomlinson, and Herbert Read.