138 BARKKR : 



anything. As a matter of fact it means nothing. Even were 

 the models well drawn, not one child in a hundred is prepared 

 to get benefit out of such work, and not one teacher in a 

 hundred is prepared to offer just criticism. It would be inter- 

 esting, but might la}' grounds for libel, to publish in this con- 

 nection fac simile reproductions of illustrations from the 

 better known systems of art education. That with bad draw- 

 ings given as drawing models, bad perspective in the perspect- 

 ive lessons, and crude ugliness shown as beauty there are 

 mingled exercises that could not be bettered, is true, but the 

 evident value of these leads the teacher and pupil alike to 

 suppose that some virtue must exist in the others, and encour- 

 ages the dangerous delusion that art and art education are in 

 some way different from other education, and confer mysteri- 

 ous benefits in mysterious ways. Moreover, this mysterious 

 benefit must approach the miraculous in the mind of the child 

 who is taught that by dropping primitive colors together hap- 

 hazard on wet paper and then letting them blend by accident 

 he is getting a thing of beauty. Surely this is not fair to the 

 child. Neither is it fair to the child to teach him that by 

 folding a piece of paper over a blot of ink and opening it up 

 again that he has an expressive decorative unit or a thing of 

 beauty. It is not fair to the child to have him paint a patch 

 of blue blending into a patch of green and to tell him it looks 

 like a spring landscape. It may or may not, but it is sheer 

 accident if it does. It is not fair to a child to show him an 

 apple and tell him to draw it with a i)lunt red crayon, and 

 then to tell him that a scratchy red patch is "very good." 

 It is not fair to a child to let him draw from a flower on his 

 desk, lying this way and that, and then to take the result 

 away with a hundred others and mark them good or bad by 

 memory of that kind of flower, or upon neatness of execution, 

 without reference to the flower that was before each child and 

 in his presence. It is not fair to a child to keep him at work 

 in all his drawing periods for two months making a portfolio 

 to keep drawings safe when he might be learning to state the 



