CHILD'S FIRST URGINGS

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LX, Issue 18057, 6 April 1933, Page 7

CHILD'S FIRST URGINGS

REPRESSION IS UNWISE SELF-EXPRESSION IN DAUBS Young children should not be repressed in their almost invariable urge to daub and scribble. Their first meaningless and futile efforts at selfexpression should not in any way be ridiculed by their parents, rather should they be encouraged, although it was better for the child to be left to its own initiative in the choice an-I use of its subject. These view's were emphatically expressed to a meeting of tho Marsden School Parents' Association, Wellington, by Colonel A. Carberry, G.L.L., president of the New Zealand Assoc,ation of Fino Arts, during a lecture on the subject, “Art and Education." The fine arts of drawing and color work had only recently come into tho school curriculum, Colonel Carberry said, but the innovation was a wi. o move. The first instincts of the modern child, according to a theory held by certain child-psychologists, were those of primitive man, and one of the most pronounced was an urge to draw and daub. From the ages of three years to Jive a child's mode of expression m drawing was the merest scribbling. After the development of that period if one looked closely at the scribbliugs one could see certain symbols which the

child was able to explain, giving a ♦ full account of what the symbols meant. Representative drawing started between the years of six to eight, and the child now being thoroughly preoccupied with its efforts, it should not be told that they were not good. Even the child who was going to be a great artist would not show' true signs of ability until about 10 years of age. All children, if encouraged in the correct way, could be taught to draw, the speaker continued. They wore born with an instinct for creation which would be of great use to them in their later life. Art education was a discipline. It trained the hands for delicate work and the minds for recognition of the beautiful. The cultural implications of a knowledge of fine art were extremely extensive. Colonel Carberry instanced two schools in Vienna as examples of modern methods of teaching the tine arts to young children.