The drawing in itself is of no consequence except as it stands for the record of an exploration and discovery.The teacher, to succeed, must be able at a glance to determine whether the child is recording concept or percept.
The result of training the child to explore, discover, and record is shown by the dotted line beginning at the eleventh year on line 2 of large chart, ending at fourteenth year (No. 30). This line is the history of a parochial school. The pupils had thirty minutes' exercise a week for about thirty weeks a year up to the first circle, from then on one hour a week for about thirty-five weeks a year. The average rate of increase in power of observation equals maintaining the average rate from the ninth to the tenth year, to the fourteenth; twenty per cent above the average of their age, ten per cent above the adult average. The line beginning in a circle at the sixteenth year, ending at nineteenth year at No. 19, is the history of a high-school class under the same drawing teacher as the above described. They received four times the training (one hundred and eighty hours a year) given the parochial school, and made, as the chart shows, exactly the same increase in two years that the former compassed in eighteen months. All the lines between these two are of classes trained by the same drawing teacher and the same method; the numbers in which they terminate indicate the number of pupils of which the circle is the center.
Is it not possible that between the lines 30 and 19 we may read the record of the atrophy suffered because of too much instructing, by putting the child in possession of facts instead of faculties, described by Dr. H. E. Armstrong, F. R. S., and in the article[1] in which he also writes: "In the future all subjects must be taught scientifically at school, in order to inculcate those habits of mind which are termed scientific habits; the teaching of scientific methods—not the mere shibboleths of some branch of natural science"?
We see by the chart that the class that began to study drawing as a science at eleven, at twelve and a half had reached seventy-seven per cent, three and a half years in advance of the later class; they reached eighty-five per cent four years in advance of the (31) boys of the high-school class, and that at an expenditure of one fourth the time.
The value of this training is necessarily a matter of opinion. The regular teachers of the classes shown on the chart at positions 29, 28, 33, 51, 39, 44, estimate that the one hour per week exercise in drawing as a science study, by the reduction of time required for a certain subject, makes the class of fourteen years
- ↑ Popular Science Monthly, September, 1894.
