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Art and The School
Do you, as an adult, know how to appreciate children's art?

Do you know why Bill loves to draw himself, his mother, or his sister, and why the people he draws are often mostly face? Why he draws himself far bigger than the door of the house? Have you ever seen a child draw his dog, then paint the kennel over the top and tell you that the dog is inside the kennel?

Children's art work must be seen through their own eyes and respected. Bill draws a large face because to him the face is the most important thing about the person. He is bigger than the door because he is far more important than the door.

It is well known how much children of all ages love to draw and paint and the importance of this mode of expression can be fully realized only when we see children developing their individuality through expressing fearlessly their experiences in their own way. A child's work is obviously not skilfully expressed. It is not desirable that it should be as the charm of the work is in its unsophisticated frankness. The purpose of this approach is to develop aesthetic sensitivity in all children and not to teach skills to the gifted few. The product does not matter, but what takes place in the mind of the child while producing is important.

Herbert Read has said—

“It is not in the nature of the child to be ‘original,’ but only to express directly its own individuality, the individuality of a seeing and feeling being, but not the originality of a thinking and inventing being. It is an important distinction, and we know now that the faults of the old methods of teaching art were due to this false bias. The child was called upon to use faculties of observation and analysis quite foreign to the pre-adolescent stage of mental development.”

In New Zealand schools we have begun comparatively late in giving art the important place it rightly holds in modern education, but children in the majority of primary schools are now given every opportunity to discover and develop their own potentialities.

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An exhibition of children's drawings and paintings has been assembled from schools all over New Zealand and is on tour at present. The work ranges from children of 5 to 15 years and shows a wide diversity of expression. Some

of the subjects are: “Me on a Horse,” “Riding on a Lorry,” “Helping Mother on Washing Day,” “Friday Night Shopping,” all of which show an individual expression of what the child knows and feels about his environment.

This is the first exhibition of its kind in New Zealand and in the future it will be most interesting to see an exhibition of work done by these same children when they have developed to the post-primary level.