Popis: |
In their development, most children leave a trail of drawings behind them. They are the most reliable and enduring of spontaneous childish artifacts. Their study appealed to the “natural history” instincts of the late Victorian era, and formed a valuable source of propaganda for advanced pedagogues who wanted tangible evidence that the “child mind” really did differ significantly from a small-scale version of the adult mentality. With the manufacture of cheap paper and pencils it became possible to amass vast amounts of data; and the study of children’s representational drawings was one of the first areas of child psychology to become established as a field of research. The 1890’s saw the inauguration of massive works which were outstanding in their scale of conception, amount of raw material amassed and accuracy of observations. Certainly by the end of the 1920’s the number of potentially testable hypotheses which had been produced formed a strikingly coherent corpus. |