E.M. Forster, sharks in tanks and unmade beds

A few years ago I published an article that explored children’s attitudes to making art, the research for which was prompted by a visit to a Royal College of art degree show; I’d taken a group of 7-11-year-olds from the primary school where I was teaching, and on the bus on the way back to school we got talking about what they wanted to be when they grew up. Since all the children had been selected for the trip because they had a particular talent for art – and since I had gone out of my way to organise this trip for them - I was confident that they would each tell me that they wanted to be an artist.

No such luck. Footballer, fireman, ‘something in the entertainment industry’ – anything, it seemed, but an artist. Slightly stung by these responses, I questioned them about their perceptions of art and artists eventually issued them each with a questionnaire. Why do adults make art? I asked. Why do children make art? Do you think you’ll make art when you grow up? And how is art important?

The responses to these questions were sufficiently reflective and varied in nature to persuade me to repeat the research on a larger scale. With the help of a group of student teachers place in schools, I gathered over 300 responses to these questions, and I also asked the same questions of student teachers themselves (apart from the one about growing up, obviously). I was intrigued to find that one response that was made occasionally by children – though never by adults - was that we make art because it is beautiful.

Initially I thought this response was ‘sweet’ – some children, it seemed, were less interested in the potential of art to challenge preconceptions, break boundaries and explore difficult themes and more interested in pretty pictures of flowers and cottages. The idea of making beautiful art seemed impossibly antiquated: it conjured up images of the Cadbury’s Flake adverts of the 1970’s, a girl in a wispy white dress painting watercolours in a cornfield. I thought of how my tutors at art school in the 1980’s would have scorned the idea of making beautiful art: when we were students, they used to tell us, we would stand at the doorway to the Pre-Raphaelite room at the Tate being sick.

But I also found myself thinking about how many of my current students – mainly non-specialist trainee primary teachers – were nervous of making art in the sessions I taught, particularly when they were asked to make some kind of representational work and especially when asked to draw from observation. In a largely misguided effort to encourage them, I would emphasise how central observational drawing had once been to the lives of young people. ‘When that place was built,’ I would say, pointing through the window to the Victorian grandeur of the main university building, ‘You lot would have been sending home from your holidays exquisite drawings of the beautiful views from your Florentine balconies, not texting your mates from a bar.’

Such reprimands – touching evocations, I liked to think, of scenes from E.M Forster novels – got me thinking about whether the Victorians – and their great-great-great-grandchildren, the schoolkids whose views on art I’d recently solicited – were perhaps right all along. The role once played by observational drawing – recording the beauty and mystery of the natural world, of brief visits to faraway places – was lost forever. Maybe there was more to art than unmade beds and sharks in tanks. Maybe beauty was important. And if it is important, shouldn’t we be getting children to think about it?