I’ve been thinking recently why drawing skills are so important and why education seems to do its best to bash natural skills and talent out of children. So her is a first dratf of my manifesto for drawing. I’m sure it will change as I focus my intentions and others add their two pennyworth. What do you think?
A Manifesto for Drawing
In this highly visual world, the image outweighs the word in power and influence, yet drawing is rarely taught. Indeed drawing and art are often taught as an academic subject with written exams. Once the art department was a safe haven for dyslexics and those who didn’t fit into academic education.
Literacy is as much about understanding the image as it is about the written word. Words are a long-winded way of creating images in other people’s heads.
Drawing and understanding the physical world around us is as important as learning to write.
Drawing is not art.
Drawing is a skill that can be taught and improved.
Children start life with an innate ability to draw, to understand and record the world around them. Education progressively destroys this ability and replaces it with feelings of inadequacy. The natural ability to draw is replaced with an insistence that written words and hand-calculated numbers are more important, even though machines do math much better.
The photocopied worksheet does not help. It is easier to get a child to colour in a photocopy than draw or trace the picture. The act of drawing or tracing sets the image in the mind and affirms the lessons being taught. Colouring-in is merely a pastime.
Drawing is an absorbing occupation that uses and strengthens the right side of the brain. In turn this leads to an increase in imagination, the one skill our children will need in the electronic, knowledge-based economy they will inherit.
Handwriting and drawing are the best way to develop ideas. The connection between brain and pencil is immediate. Computers cannot recreate this relationship, except maybe with a pen and touchscreen, but the connection is not there yet, anyway, this relies on drawing skills too.
Drawing is too often seen as Art. As a means of self-expression or financial return. Drawing can be this, but the reverence given to drawing as Art destroys children’s confidence in their undoubted abilities. Like everything else, (reading, writing and arithmetic included) teaching and practice is necessary to improve.
Improvement in drawing is possible because it is a natural ability in the first place. Drawing needs gentle teaching through demonstration and practice. Just as writing is best learned by reading, drawing is improved by looking and understanding what is being drawn. Many children who have difficulty with writing may be able to do what is asked of them far better through the medium of an image that they can through words.
Why Does education discriminate against those who are more visually adept? It’s quite simple really. Education proves itself through objective testing. Drawing cannot easily be given a score, except for the qualities that don’t matter.
There is no right way or wrong way to draw. Everyone draws differently as everyone sees the world differently. Drawing style is like handwriting. Some people will always draw in a more clear and generally understandable way. Some drawing maybe harder to interpret, but that’s what makes life interesting!
Inside us all is a caveman trying to get out and make marks with burnt sticks and coloured earth. Don’t hold back – let your hidden caveman out – get a 2b pencil and a pad of paper and have a go. You’ll be surprised how positive attitude and a little drawing everyday leads to massive improvement.