Articles

Thoughts on art education — the importance of learning to draw

 Children love to look carefully at things and can draw wonderful detail when given a chance. If they just learn a shortcut symbol, they stop looking, and there goes their drawing ability, just like that. One very interesting experiment you can try is to ask your children to draw their pet or favorite toy from memory. They will draw a rather symbolic cartoon-like shape.As they draw, ask them how many claws and whiskers does their cat or dog have, how exactly does the ear connect to the head, what shape is the nose, how many tail feathers does their pet bird have, and so on. You will see a look of shock on their faces as they realize they have no idea. Then have them draw a picture while looking at their pet or toy. They will really look carefully, since they have become very curious to see how many whiskers, etc there are. I’m sure you will be very surprised at the difference between the two drawings. You might try it for yourself, as well. Can you draw your own face or your child’s from memory, faces you see every day??

I once attended a conference for elementary school art teachers and the participants were given an exercise similar to the one above. The leader wrote words on the board like lion, giraffe, elephant, cat, dog, carrot, maple leaf, etc. We had to draw them. Then she had us draw a plant of our choice, step-by-step, from seed to the finished product be it fruit or flower. It was a big revelation to realize how much we look, but don’t see.
What amazed me most was that the kindegarten teachers in particular, just drew simplistic cartoon characters, very much like one expects 5-year olds to draw. That’s when it hit me! Do children really draw that way naturally, or they just copying the way the teachers draw? If that’s the only exposure kids get to drawing, no wonder they can’t draw anything else.

Last year an 8-year old girl took my class and later her mother brought a drawing of a tulip the girl had done in school. She said all the other children had done typical tulip symbols, but her daughter had carefully looked at how the leaves curved and the petals curled at the edges. It was a beautiful drawing of that particular, unique flower, not a stereotyped tulip shape. She was so impressed. In the US, some teachers use drawing to teach geography, biology, and other subjects. When you draw something you remember
it much better that if you just look at it or take a photo. It also improves concentration a lot.

Just giving children calm, uninterrupted time to draw, without judging or criticizing or feeling they have to “produce a product”, is so important these days, when everyone is constantly being bombarded with noise and unending activities. If kids could just learn to enjoy drawing and painting for it’s own sake, and be able to draw or paint what they like, that will stimulate their imaginations and enrich their lives. Learning to see is the key to drawing and painting.

– Kristin

Below is a very interesting article by Dr. Betty Edwards, on the importance of teaching drawing to children.

Dr. Betty Edwards
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A FEW THOUGHTS ON ART EDUCATION
April 1993

A recent article in an art education journal seriously posed the

question, “Might it be a good idea to teach students how to draw

realistically?” The authors cited various studies but reached no

conclusive answer to the question. I could pose a question of equal absurdity:

“Might it be a good idea to teach our students to read fluently and to write correctly and well?” In my view, the obvious answer to both questions is, “Of course it’s a good idea.” These are the basic skills

required if progress in learning is to follow.

The reasons that art educators ask such a question about realistic

drawing go back a long way to the 1920’s and ‘30’s and the

advent of “progressive” education. Reacting to the somewhat rigid academic art instruction of the early 1900’s and reflecting the advent of “modern” art, leaders in art education decided that teaching children how to draw realistically endangered their “natural creativity” and their ability to “express themselves”. Out went the baby with the bath water, and to this day many art educators are fearful of teaching children how to accurately depict their perceptions. This is not to say that classroom teachers

don’t ask for such depictions. They frequently urge children, in fact, to “Draw a picture of your family”, or to “Draw what you saw at the

circus.” After a lesson on Native American life, teachers may ask children as a homework assignment to draw a picture of an Indian family gathered around the campfire at night.

The problem is that drawing from memory or from imagined image is

extremely difficult, even for a trained artist. For children who have never learned even basic drawing skills, this is an impossible task, tantamount to asking a child who can neither read nor write to compose an essay on a given topic. Very young children plunge into the assigned drawings, nevertheless, and adults everywhere are charmed by the naive compositions of early childhood. Up to about age seven or eight, children also are charmed by their drawings. But all too soon comes the so-called “crisis period” in art education. Children become dissatisfied with their naive productions.

They want to be able to “Make things look real”, as they put it,

and they come to despise their efforts at drawing.

At this point, art teachers’ fear of “spoiling creativity” (and I

must add, of revealing their own inability to draw well, since most were educated in the same system) causes many teachers to simply avoid the issue.

They are sympathetic to children’s distress and say, in effect,

“Never mind, there are other ways to enjoy art.” They show reproductions of paintings and ask questions about the works. They begin to ply the children with mediums and materials? “fun stuff” like papier mache for mask-making, carved vegetables for printmaking, paint blown through straws, mosaics made of seeds and spices, Eskimo igloos made of tongue depressors, feather headdresses of colored tissue paper, scratch board made of crayons and ink.

The list is endless, and an art teacher’s storeroom is  characteristically packed to the rafters with often bizarre materials.

Meanwhile, children are trying on their own to solve the problems of

drawing realistically. Most adults can remember trying to draw the sports car or the Viking ship, seen in perspective, or the rearing horse seen in foreshortened view, drawing the image over and over, trying to get it right, so that things looked real. But all too often the attempts failed, at least in the child’s eyes, and soon the child comes to the sad conclusion, “I can’t draw.” This child grows up to be the adult in our culture who claims to be inartistic and, it often follows, uncreative.

Ironically, even though many art teachers avoid and disapprove of

realistic drawing, a few children do learn to draw well, perhaps by chance or perhaps from parents who know how to draw. These children are singled out as the class artists, the ones who have talent for art! For children who can’t draw, this makes things worse and reinforces their conviction that they could never learn to draw, since an added requirement for “artistic talent” now compounds the problem. For these children, the solution is obvious: “Give it up. Don’t try.” They then buy into the teachers’ solution of messing around in mediums and materials and agree to call that activity “Art Lessons”.

An analogy may clarify the situation. Suppose teachers were to decide that it is not a good idea to teach children how to read and write because doing well would spoil their creative use of language. (There is a parallel: in their naive use of language, young children produce charming metaphors and analogies that later disappear with the acquisition of language skills.)

Teachers would encourage continued use of naive metaphors and give lessons on creative ways to combine letters to make patterns or encourage accidental combinations of sounds and letters, but would never burden children with learning the “difficult” skills of reading and writing.

If one or two children in a class did learn to read and write by chance

or from a parent, they would be singled out as “talented in language,” and the other children would decide that they were untalented and probably could never learn. The teacher would say, “Never mind. There are other ways to enjoy language. I’ll read you a poem and we’ll talk about it.

Then, we’ll make up a nice game with words…”

This could never happen, of course, because we perceive language skills as too important to be turned into child’s play. Conversely, we perceive perceptual skills to be unimportant and, in fact, even a bit scary. Parents, especially parents of boys, are often not displeased that early fascination for drawing disappears, out of fear that their son might grow up to be a starving artist rather than a thriving doctor, lawyer, or merchant chief.

But a closer look shows the irrationality of this fear. After all, love of

language might produce a starving poet!

To revive the teaching of perceptual skills, then, requires several

fundamental changes. First, we must persuade parents that these skills are important for thinking, just as learning the skills of reading, writing, and arithmetic are important for thinking. Both are a form of cognition. Perceptual skills are basically learned through the arts: seeing (drawing), hearing (music), and movement (dance). Verbal/numerical skills are basically learned through the three R’s. These two fundamentally different forms of cognition enrich and inform each other and together produce an educated, perceptive, and creative individual.

Second, art educators must re-embrace the basic skills of their field,

that is, seeing and drawing, thus joining their colleagues, who have never given up regard for learning the basics of music (scales and chords) and movement (position and basic steps), to say nothing of basic reading, writing and arithmetic. To this end, art teachers must learn to draw? it sounds absurd, I realize. Can one imagine a classroom teacher who couldn’t read, write, add or subtract? or music and dance teachers who couldn’t play

scales or demonstrate basic steps? But indeed this dilemma of art teachers who can’t draw well is endemic in art education today for the reasons outlined above and must be remedied.

Third, teachers must integrate perceptual skills with language and mathematical skills. This means developing ways to transfer seeing to learning: how to see edges (where one thing ends and another begins); how to see spaces ( what lies between objects); how to see relationships (what are the constants and how do parts relate to these constants); how to see lights and shadows (what is known? in light and seeable, and what is still unknown? in shadow and unseeable); and, in sum, how to perceive whole configurations and how the parts fit together into congruent relationships.

At present, teachers attempt to teach these skills, often in indirect

ways that may or may not be successful with all students. I recommend direct instruction of these important ideas by means of teaching drawing, accompanied by direct instruction on how to transfer perceptual skills to other subjects. Students need the experience of actually perceiving negative space, for example, or of comprehending the meaning and importance of edges.

Fourth, educators must separate perceptual training from special-career training in the arts. After all, we do not teach language and mathematics skills with the ultimate aim to produce poets and particle physicists. A few individuals will in fact go on to those career specialties, but for most students the basic skills are essential across a wide spectrum of professions and activities. We need to change our view of the arts to fit this wider view.

A recent conversion of the Getty education philosophy is most welcome.

For some time, the main stance of the Getty group was: “ Art must stand on its own as a discipline that is valued in its own right. Art is not to be in the service of any other subject or discipline.” (1982)

In February, 1993, at a Getty-sponsored national art education

conference, the Getty group made a much-needed turnabout to a firm declaration that “Art facilitates the learning of other disciplines

(1993).” One of the principal speakers, Charles Fowler, presented the

following point of view: “…if the arts are to attain greater stature in

education, the arts education community will need to move beyond promoting ‘art for art’s sake’ and clearly convey the importance of

‘art for general education’s sake.’ ”

But the fundamental problem with the Getty approach to the visual arts remains: direct instruction in the basic skills of drawing is omitted. This omission means that children can never progress beyond naivete or beyond a kind of false abstraction. They can only become viewers, analysts, and critics of the work of an elite group designated as Artists with a capital A. To return to my previous analogy with reading, in a comparable situation

teachers would ask children to hear, analyze, and criticize great works of literature but they would never teach children to read by themselves or to write about their own ideas.

In public education today, there are myriad entrenched beliefs. I have outlined above two of the most entrenched of the beliefs held by the bureaucracy of art education, that learning to draw dooms creative expression and that, absent a genetic talent for art, no amount of teaching can produce real skill in drawing. These views persist despite centuries of art history that present clear evidence to the contrary. My own decades-long efforts to demonstrate that perceptual skills in drawing are eminently teachable, learnable, and valuable in general cognition have already been largely met with ridicule, rejection, or, simply, silence from the art education leadership community.

American educational effectiveness is in a disastrous decline.

Endeavors to repair the situation must necessarily view all entrenched beliefs with a doubting eye and, where necessary, bypass, reverse, and revise current practices and beliefs. As new educational entities arise, such as the entrepreneurial Edison project, perhaps among other changes the old ideas about drawing will give way at last to a new/old view that learning how to see things differently by means of drawing is educationally valuable.

Are Smart People Drawn To The Arts Or Does Arts Training Make People Smater

ScienceDaily (Mar. 6, 2008) — Learning, Arts, and the Brain, a study three years in the making, is the result of research by cognitive neuroscientists from seven leading universities across the United States. In the Dana Consortium study, researchers grappled with a fundamental question: Are smart people drawn to the arts or does arts training make people smarter?

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For the first time, coordinated, multi-university scientific research brings us closer to answering that question.  Learning, Arts, and the Brain advances our understanding of the effects of music, dance, and drama education on other types of learning. Children motivated in the arts develop attention skills and strategies for memory retrieval that also apply to other subject areas.

The research was led by Dr. Michael S. Gazzaniga of the University of California at Santa Barbara. “A life-affirming dimension is opening up in neuroscience,” said Dr. Gazzaniga, “to discover how the performance and appreciation of the arts enlarge cognitive capacities will be a long step forward in learning how better to learn and more enjoyably and productively to live.  The consortium’s new findings and conceptual advances have clarified what now needs to be done.”

Participating researchers, using brain imaging studies and behavioral assessment, identified eight key points relevant to the interests of parents, students, educators, neuroscientists, and policy makers.

1. An interest in a performing      art leads to a high state of motivation that produces the sustained      attention necessary to improve performance and the training of attention      that leads to improvement in other domains of cognition.
2. Genetic studies have begun to      yield candidate genes that may help explain individual differences in      interest in the arts.
3. Specific links exist between      high levels of music training and the ability to manipulate information in      both working and long-term memory; these links extend beyond the domain of      music training.
4. In children, there appear to      be specific links between the practice of music and skills in geometrical      representation, though not in other forms of numerical representation.
5. Correlations exist between      music training and both reading acquisition and sequence learning. One of      the central predictors of early literacy, phonological awareness, is      correlated with both music training and the development of a specific      brain pathway.
6. Training in acting appears to      lead to memory improvement through the learning of general skills for      manipulating semantic information.
7. Adult self-reported interest      in aesthetics is related to a temperamental factor of openness, which in      turn is influenced by dopamine-related genes.
8. Learning to dance by      effective observation is closely related to learning by physical practice,      both in the level of achievement and also the neural substrates that      support the organization of complex actions. Effective observational      learning may transfer to other cognitive skills.

Much of this research is of a preliminary nature, yielding several tight correlations but not definitive causal relationships.

Although “there is still a lot of work to be done,” says Dr. Gazzaniga, the consortium’s research so far has clarified the way forward. “We now have further reasons to believe that training in the arts has positive benefits for more general cognitive mechanisms.”

Child Art

A famous line about children and their laughter is immortalized in a  song by one of recent history's most lauded hit-makers, Whitney  Houston, in the song "The Greatest Love of All." The line read, "Let the  children's laughter, remind us how we used to be." And this is I  believe one of the truest essence of men's sense of love. Children learn  through an adult's modeling and even children's capacity to love takes  its roots from those who understand who and what children really are.

One  of children's ways of expressing themselves can be through some really  messy forms like painting. As a young boy, I used to make a great deal  out of common household stuff, like cleansers, detergents and others by  mixing them altogether and imagining what I did as something that Albert  Einstein and Marie Curie did too. I used to dream of becoming a  scientist, and I figured scientists then as those with long hair and  beard holding up test tubes with fumes rising from its acidic contents.

Children  are always thought to be very imaginative and inquisitive. They want to  try everything and test everything. If a mother would tell a young boy  not to touch the skillet because it's hot, the boy won't always  understand words without an associated actual experience, and so, the  only time that the boy would truly understand what "hot" means is when  he experiences getting burned at an attempt to touch it.

A child's  artistic side is also similarly working as other systems. Every child  is a gold mine of artistic potential and inclination. A mother, most of  the time, discovers her son's artistic inclination early on, at age four  or five, when the child starts to manipulate objects through her hands.  It is also during these times when the child begins to develop  functional dexterity. And by saying that, superstition about the child's  intelligence also emerges as many believe that left-handed individuals  tend to excel more in politics later in life and those who are  right-handed tend to be dominant in business and are knacks in the  field. Superstition, though, and doesn't have factual basis nor  evidence-based research and study.

Nonetheless, every child is an  artist, at the very onset of learning. Give them objects and you would  find children making all sorts of things with what they have. Their  hands are like tools with no trace of laziness; their brains like sponge  absorbing and imbibing as much learning as possible. Looking at a child  in itself is a satisfying moment, knowing that you are beholding what  potentially may become the world's greatest artist of all time.

The Benefits of Art and Your Child

Introducing art to children has a number of benefits ranging from improving creativity to increasing self confidence. Learn how to introduce art to your children.  

Sufiya came home after a long hard day's work. She was exhausted and irritable. When she got home she was greeted by her three—year-old son who was jumping up and down, full of energy, and yelling at the top of his voice. In the past, Sufiya would be at a loss as to what to do in such a situation. Irritated and tired, she often rudely snapped at her son to silence him and later felt guilty about it. A friend of hers suggested she encourage her son to take up painting to keep him occupied and help him channel his energy. Now whenever Sufiya needs a breather and can't play with her son, she gets him to sketch something for her. This gives Sufiya time to relax.

Art to Conquer Boredom and Stress 

Encouraging your child to doodle when he is idle is the perfect solution to boredom. Just give your child enough art material and allow his imagination to run wild. Sitting down with your child, and drawing something as well, is an excellent way to spend quality time with him.

There is a wide range of media available for your child to discover his artistic side. You can start your child with pastels, switch to water colors as he grows up, and, if he nurtures the art habit, you may even see your child graduate to oil paintings one day. Encouraging art also includes letting your child try his hand at modeling with play dough, pot painting, and other activities. Think out of the box. Have your child make something out of odds and ends, like a paper bag puppet, for example. 

Dabbling in art is also a great stress buster. In fact, psychologists encourage a child to draw so that they can draw inferences from the child's art and psychoanalyse them. Drawing and painting can also be an ideal way for children to vent their pent-up feelings.  

Benefits of dabbling in Art

Introducing your child to art can play a pivotal role in your child's development. Art can help develop a child's creativity, imagination, cognitive skills, problem-solving abilities, fine motor skills, and much more. Children who regularly participate in a comprehensive art programme are four times more likely to be elected to class office, four times more likely to be in a math or science fair, and four times more likely to win an award for writing, according to research published by Americans for the Arts.

Art helps build self esteem as children take pride in the works of art they create. It helps to develop their problem-solving skills, especially when faced with three dimensional problems such as sculpting. Art helps children to improve their sensory awareness and improve their manual dexterity. This is because a child needs to observe something, try to recreate what he see's in his mind's eye, and try to match it with reality.

Helping Your Child Discover Art

Appreciating works of art is as important as encouraging your child to take up art. Regardless of whether your child is a budding artist, or merely likes to look at pictures, a trip to the local art gallery will help to get the creative juices flowing. Children, at different ages, are found to appreciate different aspects of art. While a younger child will appreciate shapes and color, older children will focus more on how realistic the painting is. It is only after a considerable amount of study in art that a child will understand symbolism and style.

Today there are art books that have been specifically written for children, aiming to interest children in learning about some of the world's great painters and their masterpieces. An older child can be encouraged to tell stories using their pictures or even try his hand at drawing a comic strip.

If your child has a natural talent for art, try to enroll him in as many art activities as possible. These might range from art classes to summer art courses. The important point is that you nurture your child's talent without forcing him, because that might cause him to burn out and he may start hating anything to do with art.