Session Information
Contribution
This paper addresses an aspect of Art education within a historical perspective. Among the earliest theories to impact upon the teaching of Art to young children in schools was that of Friedrich Froebel (1782-1852) In his book The Education of Man, argued that 'singing, drawing, painting and modelling' must be part of any, 'universal and comprehensive plan of human education'. His advocacy of Art in the curriculum was informed by his theory of representation which encompassed the interaction of the external and internal worlds, or as he termed it, the outer and the inner. Art, in Froebel's scheme was both mimesis and the representation of the inner assisted by knowledge of form and its decomposition into 'horizontal and vertical directions' together with knowledge of colour. Drawing on the classic Froebelian texts, in the first part of this paper, Froebel's theory of Art, together with its development by subsequent Froebelian educators, is analysed and its place in the history of the teaching of Art to children is assessed. In the second part of this paper the impact of Froebel's theories of Art and his prescriptions regarding its teaching are discussed. Two lines of enquiry are followed. The first, drawing extensively on the journals Child Life and Hand and Eye, focuses upon revisionist critics of Froebel's system for teaching Art such as Maria Findlay (1855-1912) and the prominence given within it to the network of squares within which the child had to draw. The second concerns the Brosterman thesis which he outlined in his book, Inventing Kindergarten (1997). This asserts a causal link between kindergarten practices and modernism in Art and the Bauhaus in particular. In addition to contributing to a reassessment of Froebel's work in the fields of schooling and Art, Brosterman's thesis raises questions of what constitutes evidence for causal explanation in history and the difficulties associated with the notion of influence. These issues form the substance of the concluding section of the paper.
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