Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/782

764 drawing. Teachers will teach for that which the examiner seeks, and the drawings shown will be as free from error, as neat and clean, as the spelling would be under the same plan of examination, and have no more educational value. The ability to locate correctly is the foundation of success in free-hand drawing, and to a great extent in all the graphic arts. It can be as well tested in five minutes as in fifty. A glance at line 1, eighth year, shows that if the teacher has lent no greater aid to the class than sustaining the attention during the exercise, the drawing that would without that aid be so badly located as to be almost unrecognizable may be made to appear on the eighty-five-per-cent line, ten per cent better than the average adult unaided would make it. That this is true will be recognized by all teachers who have studied the exhibitions of pupils' drawings where a whole class seems to do excellent work. Sustaining the attention of the pupil is invaluable in instruction; by its power the child of any age above eight may learn as much fact in two minutes as the average adult can unaided in fifteen (see lines 1 and 2), but sustaining the attention makes voluntary effort unnecessary; that which makes conscious effort needless makes it impossible. The power to direct the attention unaided by outside stimulus becomes atrophied, observation impossible. The use of transparent planes, the theory of perspective, and all devices by which "drawing is made easy," only serve to rob it of educational value by putting the child in possession of technical tricks which make observing facts of no account.

Having the child draw the familiar object from Nature is another fatal mistake. The familiar object and language co-ordinate to perfection. The child may study and try to represent the difference between two objects as seen without danger, but he will correctly describe that in language long before he can graphically, because he can, while looking, put what he sees into words; but to draw, he must look at a blank page and recall, what? The strongest impression, whether because of the recency, frequency, or intensity of it. I have known the recall to reach back a whole week, a month, three months, because of the greater intensity put into some former effort to observe objects associated with those to be represented, the concept of which the pupil, though four-teen years of age, was powerless to inhibit. It is to this inability to indefinitely continue the inhibition of the conceived thing, rather than to lack of knowledge or defective vision, that most