Art Education and the Child.

 Author - Brian Hawkeswood..                                                                                                               Scrollen Sie nach unten für die deutsche Version.

I have read the books, turned their pages in quiet hours under a lamp’s glow, and absorbed the theories that have long shaped academic discourse. Some of these theories, I confess, contain truth, like faint starlight arriving from a distant past. But I have also sat, year after year, before the spontaneous and unvarnished theatre of children making art. I have watched their hands move—uncertain at first, then boldly, irresistibly—across paper, canvas, walls. I have listened to their small voices invent, protest, declare. And I have come to know, as only decades of intimacy can teach one, not merely how children learn to make art—but more painfully, how they fail to learn it.

This failure, I have come to understand, is not born of the child but of the adult world: its blindness, its stale myths, its comfortable refusal to see. Adults, with their well-worn prejudices and memories of their own artistic defeats, carry into the world a view of art so impoverished that it shapes—even sabotages—the artistic education of the next generation. And most devastating of all is the conviction that art cannot truly be taught, that one must be born with the flame already lit or else stumble forever in the dark.

But I must insist: this is not so.

There is, as with all disciplines, a pedagogy to art. There is structure, logic, progression, and there is wonder—but it is a wonder that grows with nourishment. I have seen the results in the artwork of children and adolescents. I have seen, too often, the opposite—those who were left to wander alone, to repeat the same stylised images until their hands grew tired, their eyes dimmed, and they came to believe the lie that they lacked talent.

Yes, most children can make marks on paper, shapes that resemble faces, houses, suns. But these are the by-products of perception and gesture, of motor skill and imitation. Without guidance, without insight into how one sees—how one really sees—the child draws not the world but a shorthand of it. A sun in the corner. A triangle for a roof. A stick with a circle on top. Symbols of a world they have not yet learned to observe.

Unless the child learns—through meaningful instruction, through the gentle unfolding of skill—they remain fixed. Stuck. Repeating the same visual phrases like a child who never learns new words. And the tragedy is not merely in the repetition, but in the adult who praises it as “creative.” For the adult, too, was left behind once, and now sees in the child’s arrested development a mirror of their own.

I have taught these children. I have watched them transform. Not because they were “gifted” but because they were taught. The so-called “gifted” child is not one born with a divine spark, but one who—consciously or by chance—has learned. And learning, in the truest sense, is never magic.

A child crouches on the floor, surrounded by the sacred quiet of morning light, crayon in hand. Before them, a great sheet of paper—larger, it seems, than their own body. And upon it, a first mark: tremulous, unsteady, but possessed of a secret vitality. Then another mark, and another—arcs and loops, bursts of colour like little fireworks of the hand. The adult, moved by affection or curiosity, may pick up a pencil and draw a line or two beside them, a subtle nudge, and the child responds—not by imitation alone, but by entering into the mysterious joy of creating form from nothing. The page becomes a field of possibility. And from this moment, something begins.

Howard Gardner, in his Artful Scribbles, reminds us that the earliest gestures are not representations but rhythms—kinesthetic reveries, bodily acts. The child is not trying to depict the world; they are inhabiting it through motion. Pressure, velocity, direction: these are the unconscious physics of their young imagination. Scribbles become spirals, spirals circles, and the child—eager to repeat the magic—begins to see a correspondence between their inner energy and the mark it leaves behind.

These are not drawings of the world, but drawings into the world.

Then a shift: the child recognises patterns. They begin to repeat shapes. They assign meaning. A circle becomes a face, two lines a house, a jagged edge a mountain. And thus is born what Gardner calls the “symbolic stage.” Between the ages of four and seven, the child acquires a vocabulary—not of words, but of pictures. Their works become incantations of meaning: this is mummy, this is the sun, this is me. But these are not portraits; they are emblems, heraldic signs of identity and story. A child draws not to replicate what they see, but to articulate what they feel, what they remember, what they know in the deep, pre-verbal recesses of the self.

And how rich these images are! They speak with the candour of dreams. A girl with shoes that float above the ground. A tree with hearts for leaves. A family with no mouths, but giant eyes. Often the drawing is accompanied by a narrative—a tale woven with breathless joy or quiet insistence—and the picture is a kind of theatre, a stage for memory and invention.

But—and here is the sorrow—I have seen, too often, that this symbolic richness decays into repetition. A rainbow drawn for the fifty-seventh time. A sun in the upper corner of every page. A house with three square windows and no interior. These are not the products of creative freedom, but of its exhaustion. The child draws this way because no one has shown them anything else. They are stuck in a visual echo chamber, repeating a vocabulary that no longer grows.

And the adult, seeing this, smiles and says: “How creative!”

This is where I part company with Gardner. He is right to describe the stages; they are real enough. But he never quite dares to say what I must: that art can be taught. Not imposed, not drilled into lifelessness—but revealed, as a language that anyone can learn. Like reading, like music, like geometry. The child need not remain trapped in symbols. They can be led—gently, imaginatively—into the realm of observation.

I have taught children as young as seven to see—not just to look, but to see. To draw what is in front of them. To recognise that the beach is not yellow, the tree not merely green. That the ball is not a circle, but a sphere, with shadow and sheen. That light has texture. That space has depth. I have placed a cardboard frame before the window and told them: “Now look.” And when they did—really did—the world changed.

That moment, when a child sees the world not as symbol but as presence, as form, as light and surface and shape—it is like a second birth. And it is not a miracle. It is pedagogy.

By the time the child is seven, something else has crept in—not with malice, not with noise, but with a quiet, mechanical insistence: order. They begin to build pictures the way language builds sentences. A sun is always in the upper-right corner, obedient as the punctuation at the end of a line. Trees sprout symmetrically on either side of a house that looks more like an emblem than a place. A band of blue at the top of the page is the sky; a band of green at the bottom, the grass; and between them, the world shrinks into a corridor of repetition.

This is what the theorists call the schematic stage, and rightly so. The child is developing systems—visual codes, rules for representation. There is something endearing, even brilliant, in their consistency. They are trying to stabilise the visual chaos of the world with symbols that can be mastered. But mastery without guidance becomes mimicry. And mimicry, over time, becomes a form of boredom.

In my classroom, I have seen it: a fatigue of invention. A girl, bored of rainbows, draws them again. A boy, fatigued by footballers in profile, draws the same again. The line becomes brittle; the page empties itself of spirit. These children have not lost their “creativity”—they have been abandoned by their education. No one has opened the door for them to pass through. The house of childhood is small, and they have outgrown it. But no one has given them a key to the next house.

Here, the myth of innate talent returns like a plague. “He’s gifted,” someone says. “She just has it.” But what does that mean? Nothing more than this: that some children, by accident or instinct, stumble upon what should have been taught to all. A gifted child is a taught child. Taught by books, by parents, by sheer persistence or chance. They have learned what others could have learned.

Yet the adult world clings to the romance of the “natural.” And in doing so, it excuses its failures. If art cannot be taught, then why fund it? Why train its teachers? Why design proper curricula? Any stick-figure will do. Any untrained “creative” will suffice. And so schools appoint the unqualified, the indifferent, the unprepared—and then wonder why the subject does not flourish.

I have witnessed it—year after year. The administrators who reduce art to glue sticks and glitter, who think a child painting on the back of a canvas is innovation. The principals who say, “Why not use the other side?” without understanding the sanctity of surface, of intention. These are people who never passed the schematic stage themselves. Their eyes never learned to see. Their minds never learned to draw.

And when they meet a real artist-teacher, they do not recognise what they see. Or worse: they do. And they fear it. Because the presence of real knowledge casts a long shadow over their ignorance. And their response, invariably, is bureaucratic violence. To marginalise, to sideline, to ridicule, to remove. I have seen this. I have lived this.

And the children pay the price.

The tragedy is not that children fail to draw well. The tragedy is that they are not shown how. That their curiosity is mistaken for talent, and their fatigue for lack of it. That their rainbow drawings are called “creative” long after they have grown weary of them. That no one has said: “Come, look at the world. Here is how to see it. Here is how to begin again.”

By adolescence, the child—if still drawing—has entered a new country. It is the land of doubt.

Here, the lines are sharper, the eye more critical, and the spirit less certain of itself. The adolescent no longer draws to narrate but to measure, to test the accuracy of what they see against the stubborn weight of what they wish to express. In the earlier years, a figure could float joyfully without gravity; now, the desire is to ground it—to have it stand in space, to be seen as real. The sky, once a stripe of blue, must now recede; the tree, once a green lollipop, must now have limbs, textures, shadows.

But no one has shown them how.

So they stop. Or they apologise for their efforts before the pencil even touches the paper. “I can’t draw,” they say, eyes averted, as though confessing a fault in their very being. What they mean is, “I was never taught to see.” And so their vision, untrained, collapses into silence.

What we call “realism” at this stage is often not a goal but a battlefield. It is the place where the intuitive symbols of childhood meet the perceived world, and lose. The drawing fails not because the child has no vision, but because the hand has not been trained to serve the eye. And so they abandon the attempt. Or worse, they continue to draw what they drew when they were nine, never having learned another way.

But it is not too late.

With proper teaching—structured, deliberate, and open-hearted—this moment can become transformative. I have seen it in my classroom: the astonishment on a sixteen-year-old’s face when they first see a shadow curve around a form and understand how to trace it. The moment when a student realises that a face is not a symbol but a field of light, tone, and structure. This revelation is not merely technical. It is emotional. It is the beginning of expression with substance.

And when this happens, when the young artist begins to marry perception with skill, something remarkable occurs. They re-encounter the vision of their childhood, not as memory, but as material. The symbolic richness, the narratives, the visual poetry—all of it returns, now filtered through an awakened eye and a disciplined hand. This is the maturity of artistic language: not the abandonment of childhood, but its translation.

Gardner, for all his brilliance, falters here. He suggests that the most gifted artists are those who retain the child’s vision, and in this he is correct. But he fails to see that such retention is not mystical—it is pedagogical. It is learned. The return to poetic vision is not a regression, but an ascent: the child’s symbols made visible again through skill. The dream, remembered and made articulate.

But without education, there is no ascent. Only repetition. Only the desert of undeveloped style, where talent is misread as fate and failure mistaken for truth.

I say again: art can be taught. Art must be taught.

For it is not only the hand that learns, but the mind and the eye and the self. The teaching of art is the teaching of seeing—not just the surface of things, but the structure, the interrelation, the essence. And what follows is not only the ability to make art, but the ability to look at the world with a more capacious soul.

And what of the adult who never had this? They carry the silence within them. They look at their children’s drawings with pride, yes, but also a faint panic. They do not know what to do with them. They encourage, they praise, but they do not guide. Because they themselves were never guided. They do not know that art begins not with inspiration, but with attention—and that attention is something taught, cultivated, refined.

And so the cycle continues. The adult who cannot draw becomes the administrator who cannot value drawing. The teacher who was never taught becomes the one who teaches nothing. And when someone arrives who can teach, who does know, the system recoils. It is easier to maintain the myth of the “gifted” than to admit the scale of institutional failure.

And so it is left to a few—to those who persist, who believe, who have seen with their own eyes what happens when a child is taught to see. We are dismissed, often, as idealists. But we are not. We are realists of the deepest kind. We have witnessed the reality of transformation.

Art Education and the Child

Closing Meditation: A Statement of Advocacy, Critique, and Hope

Let us speak now without metaphor.

Let us step out from behind the dream of coloured chalk dust, and say plainly what must be said. That the failure of art education is not a minor oversight—it is a catastrophe of the spirit. And it is a quiet catastrophe, the kind that occurs not in a single moment, but over decades. It happens when we allow a generation to grow up believing that seeing is not a skill, that drawing is not a language, that art is the domain of the chosen few. It happens in every classroom where no one teaches the child how to observe, how to shape, how to understand the visual world.

It happens when we call this neglect “freedom.” It happens when we mistake permissiveness for respect.

We do not do this in mathematics. We do not hand a child a calculator at random and say, “Express your number self.” We do not tell a child to discover grammar through pure inspiration. We teach them. We guide them. We give them the tools of the culture they inhabit. Why then, in art, do we abandon them?

Because we ourselves were abandoned.

And this is the tragedy that repeats, like a faulty loop in the film reel of public education. The administrators, the policymakers, the school leaders—they were once children too, with drawings that were never nurtured, with hands that reached for colour and were left to falter. They carry that shame quietly. They think it is natural. They believe the lie that they “have no talent.” And so they build systems that reflect that internal silence.

Art becomes a decorative subject. A filler. A frill. An afterthought.

And yet—I have seen the opposite. I have seen what happens when children are taught to see, to draw, to build a visual language. I have watched the transformation unfold in real time: the slumped body straightening as confidence returns, the dull eyes sharpening as the world becomes textured again. Not all become artists. That is not the point. But they all become witnesses—to their own perceptions, their own stories, their own worth.

Because art is not a luxury. It is a human inheritance.

And we who teach it carry an enormous responsibility. Not simply to hand out brushes, but to guide children into a way of being in the world that is more perceptive, more articulate, more empathetic. We do not just teach drawing—we teach seeing. We do not just teach colour—we teach nuance. We teach presence. We teach reflection. We teach care.

So I say this, now, as plainly as I can:

Art must be taught.

Art can be taught.

And those who say otherwise do not understand what teaching is.

To those who hold the keys to curriculum, to those who appoint and dismiss, to those who mock what they do not comprehend—I say: your ignorance is not benign. You are damaging what you do not see. You are raising generations of children into silence.

And to those who have been silenced—students, teachers, parents—I say: speak.

Speak through the pencil, the brush, the line, the clay. Speak through your children’s drawings. Speak against the systems that reduced this profound, human birthright to a classroom leftover. Speak with your practice. Speak with your defiance. Speak with your art.

For it is not too late.

It is never too late to learn to see.

And never too late to teach others to see.

And once we see the world clearly—its light, its complexity, its shadowed corners—then we cannot help but remake it with greater care.

That is what art teaches. And that is why we must teach art.

                                                                                    ******************************************

Kunsterziehung und das Kind

Ich habe die Bücher gelesen, ihre Seiten in stillen Stunden unter dem Schein einer Lampe umgeblättert und die Theorien aufgenommen, die den akademischen Diskurs seit Langem prägen. Einige dieser Theorien, das muss ich gestehen, enthalten Wahrheit – wie schwaches Sternenlicht, das aus ferner Vergangenheit zu uns gelangt. Doch ich habe auch, Jahr für Jahr, dem spontanen und unverfälschten Theater der Kinder beim Kunstmachen beigewohnt. Ich habe ihre Hände beobachtet – anfangs zögerlich, dann kühn, unwiderstehlich –, wie sie über Papier, Leinwand, Wände fuhren. Ich habe ihren kleinen Stimmen gelauscht – wie sie erfanden, protestierten, erklärten. Und ich habe durch Jahrzehnte der Vertrautheit nicht nur gelernt, wie Kinder Kunst machen lernen – sondern, schmerzlicher noch, wie sie es nicht lernen.

Dieses Scheitern, so habe ich erkannt, entspringt nicht dem Kind, sondern der Erwachsenenwelt: ihrer Blindheit, ihren abgestandenen Mythen, ihrer bequemen Weigerung hinzusehen. Erwachsene, mit ihren festgefahrenen Vorurteilen und Erinnerungen an eigene künstlerische Niederlagen, tragen ein so verarmtes Bild von Kunst in die Welt hinaus, dass es die künstlerische Bildung der nächsten Generation prägt – ja, sabotiert. Und das verheerendste aller Vorurteile ist die Überzeugung, dass Kunst nicht wirklich gelehrt werden könne – dass man mit einer inneren Flamme geboren sein müsse oder für immer im Dunkeln tappen werde.

Doch ich muss darauf bestehen: Das ist nicht wahr.

Wie in allen Disziplinen gibt es auch in der Kunst eine Pädagogik. Es gibt Struktur, Logik, Entwicklung – und es gibt ein Staunen, das jedoch genährt werden muss. Ich habe die Ergebnisse in den Arbeiten von Kindern und Jugendlichen gesehen. Ich habe, leider zu oft, das Gegenteil gesehen – Kinder, die allein gelassen wurden, die immer wieder dieselben stilisierten Bilder malten, bis ihre Hände müde wurden, ihre Augen trüb, und sie begannen, die Lüge zu glauben, sie hätten kein Talent.

Ja, die meisten Kinder können Spuren auf Papier hinterlassen, Formen, die Gesichtern, Häusern oder Sonnen ähneln. Doch dies sind Nebenprodukte von Wahrnehmung und Geste, von Motorik und Nachahmung. Ohne Anleitung, ohne Einsicht in die Kunst des Sehens – des wirklichen Sehens – zeichnet das Kind nicht die Welt, sondern eine Abkürzung davon. Eine Sonne in der Ecke. Ein Dreieck als Dach. Ein Strich mit einem Kreis obendrauf. Symbole einer Welt, die es noch nicht gelernt hat zu beobachten.

Wenn das Kind nicht lernt – durch sinnvollen Unterricht, durch die behutsame Entfaltung von Fähigkeiten –, bleibt es gefangen. Es wiederholt dieselben visuellen Phrasen wie ein Kind, das nie neue Wörter lernt. Und die Tragödie liegt nicht nur in der Wiederholung, sondern in dem Erwachsenen, der sie als „kreativ“ preist. Denn auch dieser Erwachsene wurde einst zurückgelassen – und sieht in der künstlerischen Stagnation des Kindes sein eigenes Spiegelbild.

Ich habe diese Kinder unterrichtet. Ich habe ihre Verwandlung miterlebt. Nicht, weil sie „begabt“ waren, sondern weil sie unterrichtet wurden. Das sogenannte „begabte“ Kind ist nicht eines, das mit einem göttlichen Funken geboren wurde, sondern eines, das – bewusst oder zufällig – gelernt hat. Und Lernen, im tiefsten Sinne, ist nie Magie.

Ein Kind hockt am Boden, umgeben vom heiligen Morgenlicht, mit einem Wachsmalstift in der Hand. Vor ihm ein großes Blatt Papier – größer, so scheint es, als sein eigener Körper. Und darauf ein erster Strich: zitternd, unsicher, aber von geheimer Lebendigkeit erfüllt. Dann ein weiterer, und noch einer – Bögen und Schleifen, Farbausbrüche wie kleine Feuerwerke der Hand. Der Erwachsene, gerührt von Zuneigung oder Neugier, greift vielleicht selbst zum Stift und zieht ein paar Linien daneben – ein feiner Impuls –, und das Kind antwortet: nicht bloß durch Nachahmung, sondern indem es sich in die geheimnisvolle Freude hineinbegibt, aus dem Nichts Form zu erschaffen. Das Blatt wird zum Feld der Möglichkeiten. Und in diesem Moment beginnt etwas.

Howard Gardner erinnert uns in seinem Werk Artful Scribbles, dass die frühesten Gesten keine Darstellungen, sondern Rhythmen sind – körperliche Träumereien, leibliche Akte. Das Kind versucht nicht, die Welt abzubilden; es bewohnt sie durch Bewegung. Druck, Geschwindigkeit, Richtung – dies sind die unbewussten Gesetze der jungen Vorstellungskraft. Kritzeleien werden zu Spiralen, Spiralen zu Kreisen, und das Kind – begierig, die Magie zu wiederholen – erkennt eine Verbindung zwischen seiner inneren Energie und der Spur, die sie hinterlässt.

Doch hier – genau hier – liegt der entscheidende Moment. Wird das Kind von jemandem begleitet, der weiß, wie man diesen Impuls nährt, der das Sehen lehrt, die Bedeutung von Linie und Form, von Raum und Proportion, dann entfaltet sich etwas Großes. Wenn nicht – wenn man das Kind einfach weitermachen lässt, ohne Richtung, ohne Rückmeldung, in der bloßen Wiederholung des Bekannten –, dann wird sich der frühe Zauber abnutzen. Die Zeichnungen werden flacher, formelhafter, leer. Was einst leuchtete, wird zur mechanischen Geste.

Deshalb braucht das Kind Anleitung. Nicht Bevormundung. Nicht das berüchtigte „Kunsthandwerk“, bei dem alle dasselbe basteln. Sondern echte, respektvolle Anleitung: das Kind sehen, wie es sieht, und es von dort aus tiefer führen.

Es gibt ein weitverbreitetes Missverständnis, dass Struktur der Feind der Kreativität sei. Ich glaube das Gegenteil. Die größten Künstler, die ich unterrichtet habe – in ihren frühen Jahren – waren jene, die durch Strukturen befreit wurden. Ihnen wurde gezeigt, wie man schaut, wie man misst, wie man übersetzt. Und so befreit vom bloßen Raten konnten sie dann spielen. Und dieses Spiel war nicht das eines Kindes, das allein gelassen wurde, sondern eines, das ausgerüstet war – wie ein Musiker, der nicht nur Töne hört, sondern auch Harmonien begreift.

Ich habe mit eigenen Augen gesehen, wie sich eine kindliche Zeichnung, scheinbar unbeholfen, in ein Kunstwerk verwandelte – nicht, weil sie kopierte, sondern weil sie verstand. Ich habe gesehen, wie ein achtjähriger Junge seine erste Portraitskizze machte, bei der das Ohr wirklich an der richtigen Stelle saß – nicht durch Zufall, sondern weil er gelernt hatte, es zu sehen. Sein Gesicht, als er es bemerkte, war ein Leuchten, das ich nie vergessen werde.

Was wir „Talent“ nennen, ist oft einfach der Moment, in dem Verstehen und Ausdruck sich berühren.

Wir haben die Pflicht – die Verantwortung – nicht nur für das einzelne Kind, sondern für unsere Kultur als Ganzes, Kunst als Sprache des Denkens zu behandeln. Kinder werden mit der Fähigkeit geboren, sich auszudrücken, ja – aber sie werden nicht mit der Fähigkeit geboren, komplexe visuelle Ideen zu entwickeln. Das muss gelehrt werden. So wie wir das Alphabet lehren, lehren wir auch Linienführung, Perspektive, Farbverständnis, Komposition. Es ist kein Wunder, dass so viele Erwachsene sagen, sie könnten „nicht zeichnen“. Sie meinen damit: „Ich wurde nie unterrichtet.“

Ich schreibe dies nicht als Theoretiker, sondern als jemand, der vierzig Jahre lang mit Kindern gearbeitet hat – in Klassenzimmern, in Ateliers, in Schulhöfen, auf Exkursionen mit Skizzenbuch in der Hand. Ich habe gesehen, wie Kinder – auch jene, die „nicht gut in Kunst“ seien – durch kluge Anleitung aufblühten. Und ich habe auch das Gegenteil gesehen: wie potenzielle Künstler, nicht als solche erkannt, in der Gleichgültigkeit eines Bildungssystems versanken, das das Visuelle nie ernst genommen hat.

Es gibt Kinder, deren Denken bildhaft ist – die durch Form und Farbe begreifen, was andere durch Zahlen tun. Wenn wir ihnen keinen Zugang zur Sprache der Kunst geben, verwehren wir ihnen einen wesentlichen Teil des Denkens.

Die Gesellschaft wird das bezahlen. In trostlosen Räumen. In seelenlosen Produkten. In einer Kultur, die das Auge vernachlässigt hat – und mit ihm die Seele.

Was wir brauchen, ist ein Unterricht, der nicht fragt: „Was willst du machen?“, sondern: „Was siehst du wirklich?“ Und dann: „Wie kann ich dir helfen, das zu zeigen?“ Kinder, die so unterrichtet wurden, zeichnen anders. Sie zeichnen mit Bewusstsein, mit Entdeckung, mit Wahrheit.