THE TEACHING OF DRAWING IN PREPARATORY

SCHOOLS.

ITS SPECIAL DIFFICULTIES-SHORT TIME-NO CLASSIFICATION FOR DRAWING ITS EVILS.

As we are not to consider how drawing may best be taught, but how it may best be taught in Preparatory Schools, it may be well first to consider what difficulties and limitations the special conditions of the case impose on us.

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In the first place, only a short time can be given to itgenerally one short school hour a week. This must be considered, lest we fail by attempting too much. Then the Drawing Master in a Preparatory School has to deal with classes, often large, arranged according to proficiency in other studies and with no regard whatever to capacity for drawing. This last is the most serious difficulty in the way of the satisfactory teaching of drawing in Preparatory Schools. In the ordinary Art School few students present themselves who have not somewhat special talent or inclination for Drawing. Each is set to the work he is most needing or most fitted for. His liking for the work impels him to do his best, and by means of a staff of masters he receives such attention and assistance as he needs. We, in the Preparatory Schools, have to teach boys a subject for which aptitudes vary very greatly in classes formed with no reference whatever to these great diversities. consequence, we do not get the best possible results from any of our pupils. Boys with fair drawing capacity are happily the majority, but in all the higher forms their progress is retarded almost to the pace possible to the dull ones, while the really artistic boys are always kept at work much below their powers. Many young boys with a talent for drawing (which has, in some cases, received considerable attention at home) enter a school, naturally enough, in its lowest form, yet to keep them long in Standard I. and II. in drawing is like keeping them at pot-hooks and hangers, when they can already write fairly well. On the other hand, there are many clever boys who have unskilful fingers and but little sense of form. If these could be left longer in the preparatory stages of training in drawing. probably they would get soundly grounded and start hopefully. As it is, they get deservedly promoted for good work in other subjects and find themselves unwillingly confronted with the greater drawing difficulties of the higher form, though they

know they have proved unequal to those of the form they have left. The result is often a hopeless feeling that they will never be able to draw, which sometimes deepens into dislike for a subject in which they feel themselves conspicuously backward. It will readily be imagined what a hindrance such boys are to the rest of the form, and what a thorn they are in the side of the Master.

It often happens, too, that boys of ten or twelve come from other schools and go at once into the middle and upper forms, who have previously done little or no drawing. These have to commence the study in Standard IV., with obvious disadvantage to themselves and the rest of the class.

The suggestion will probably occur that such boys and backward boys, though working among more advanced boys, should be given easier work, but when the conditions of collective teaching (which I am shortly to describe) are taken into account it will be seen how difficult, if not impossible, this is.

COLLECTIVE TEACHING.

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Large classes of boys of varying capacity necessitate what is called collective teaching. In an Art School each is set to his own work, towards which he has sufficient inclination to keep himself going satisfactorily, with the occasional assistance of a master. At the Preparatory School, if a separate model were placed before each boy in the lower forms, many, if unaided, could not make a start, few would make much effort, and some would go wrong at almost every line. The small space of time the Master would be able to give to each of the 20 to 25 boys would be wholly insufficient to enable any but the most gifted of them to produce a moderately satisfactory result. difficulty has led to collective teaching. A large flat copy, placed in view of the whole class, is described by the teacher, who directs, step by step, the whole class in the drawing of itprobably himself drawing it line by line on the blackboard should leave his rostrum between each direction, and try to get round to each boy in the class to see that his instructions have been carried out. With simple flat copies he will, if energetic, experience little difficulty; except, perhaps, in keeping quiet the quick boys, who do what he tells them at once, and are sometimes unoccupied while he is working round the class, bringing on the slower ones. In the higher forms simple objects take the place of flat copies, and the difference between the best and worst among the pupils is continually increasing, as is also the difficulty in describing, directing, and demonstrating the drawing of the more complex models. If the Master gives separate subjects to one or two boys, he will find it very difficult to snatch a few minutes from conducting the main body of the class to help the separated pupils. Those few minutes will prove insufficient for the purpose, and will generally give an opportunity for idleness and consequent disorder in the rest of the class.

EARLY TRAINING OF INFANTS.

By the early training of the eye and hand, a good deal may be done to lessen these natural inequalities which occasion so much trouble in our classes. There is little doubt that such training may well be among the first a child should receive; it is so easy to make it a form of play, and it is the natural means by which a child is taught to recognise and draw its letters. A small blackboard and a piece of chalk should be in every nursery, for it is easier for a very small child to control its hand and fingers on a large space than on a small one, and it is better that it should stand to its work, or, if sitting, should draw on an upright board, than bend over a slate or a piece of paper. Straight lines connecting two dots (which should be done by the nurse) are easily made by very young children, and great is the delight when a few of these lines are found to form a flag. Eggs, too, of varying sizes and proportions are easily drawn and gleefully whitened into resemblance. In the Infant School and Kindergarten there are great opportunities for valuable eye and hand training, and these schools should, by the time the child is seven or eight years old, have done a good deal of the preliminary work.

A GRADUATED COURSE FOR INFANT AND PREPARATORY SCHOOLS, STANDARDS I-VI.

We must plan out our work into stages, and the "Course of Instruction" prescribed by the Science and Art Department, in its" Illustrated Syllabus" (Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1895), seems to me so carefully graduated, that I think we cannot do better than adopt its seven standards as a kind of fundamental plan, to be altered as special circumstances may suggest. It is also very desirable to give careful attention to the "Alternative Illustrated Syllabus" issued by the Science and Art Department at the same time. This last combines some of the ideas of the Kindergarten with what may be called frecarm drawing, and, from the beginning and all through the course, it aims at giving the pupil' freedom and facility, and at familiarising him with the elemental forms in all possible inversions and combinations, thus educing the inventive and designing faculties. It seems to me specially desirable that teachers of young children should combine some of the methods of the " Alternative Syllabus" in the three lowest drawing classes with those of the ordinary "course Standards I., II., and III.

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The youngest may begin with freearm drawing on slae t blackboards, or blackened millboards, of ellipses encouraging the hand to pass again and again freely over the same curves, then slightly varying the forms of the ellipse as suggested in the syllabus. Freearm lines should be drawn from dot to dot. to dot. In the second stage pencil and paper be used for the same exercises, and the curves and lines should be varied, inverted, and combined into simple

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patterns. This, with exercises in the use of the ruler, may suffice for Standard II.; but if children are kept long in these standards as, if they begin young enough, they ought to be the simple brushwork exercises of the Alternative Syllabus would no doubt be interesting and profitable. These, if commenced in Standard II., be continued in Standard III., but I think they are not desirable after that stage, as I am of opinion that the continued practice of the kind of brushwork there recommended would be more likely to form bad habits and to produce an undesirable mannerism than to be of any after use in painting.

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A boy should have done work equivalent to that of the first and second standards before he comes to the Preparatory School, but, as it frequently happens that he has not done so, it is necessary for us to start as low down as Standard II. as just

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In Standard III. the work should be principally from flat copies, similar to those recommended by the Department in its ordinary course for this standard. They should, however, be combined with the judging of angles and proportions, with simple drawing to scale, with dictated drawing, elementary designing, and drawing from memory. The teacher may derive very

valuable assistance in these matters from the works of Mr. Ablett and Mr. E. R. Taylor, of Birmingham. He is more likely to make these very useful exercises interesting to pupils at this stage than after they have felt the importance of drawing from real objects. When that course is entered upon (as it is in the next grade) there is so much to be done before the time for leaving the Preparatory School in training to a precise observation of form, of relative depths of tone, and in mastering such elementary perspective as will assist in the drawing of simple objects, that I think it is desirable to put away the Alternative Syllabus at this point, for, though it is admirably adapted to develop powers of design, it almost ignores the training of the faculties of observation and representation.

I regard the work up to this stage as most important. When it has been commenced early and been well done it will take mest of the difficulty from the rest of the course.

In the next stage (analogous to Standard IV.) the flat copies provided by the Department may be used, but in my own practice at this point I have almost wholly superseded them by easy common objects. These are much more interesting to the pupils, who feel that they are now actually drawing real things and not from copies. There is, too, the great advantage in our too-mixed classes that the model provides a study in outline drawing which even the backward boys can achieve, and in addition a study in real shading for the more advanced ones at the same lesson. The eagerness to shade, which seems almost universal, should be used to induce boys to take greater care with the outline, a good outline gaining the privilege of shading. Whether using flat copies or simple objects it is always well to begin by requiring each boy to estimate, as well as he can, the actual measurement in inches of one or two of the principal