You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This little book on the art of mental training through drawing is an elaborated general outline of the Woodbury Course in observation. This outline is given in considerable detail, largely for the purpose of directing normal school teachers in teaching children the value of observation. Each part of the book starts off with a more or less lengthy, but appropriate quotation from Leonardo da Vinci.
The attitude of the authors toward observation is that it has no interest as a mere curiosity, but is constructive looking, that is, an examination for a purpose with reference to both cause and effect, “It is not an attempt to memorize a visual image after the manner of the Chinese, who are forced to learn about 4,000 characters before the classics may be read, but rather, from the beginning of the training, it is the search for the laws of nature and man.” They also direct attention and discuss Dewey's descriptive stages of the Manipulation, the Symbolic and the Realistic phases; the behavior of children during the first phase being characterized by acquainting themselves with the object, usually by smashing or misusing it, in the second by attaching their own personal symbols and in the third by using the material as vehicles for ideas. In fact, children feel the necessity for realistic expression long before they indicate that need or ask for help. As a measure of observation, the authors imply that drawing and painting should be instituted as a factor in fundamental training in clear thinking and, therefore, should be in the curriculum of every school and college and that this training should tend toward the purpose of acquainting the child with the making of the world in the large, in connection with causes and effects, and to establish the habit of intelligent observation at all times.
The subject matter, as it is presented, is arranged in two large groups—drawing and composition. The parts concerned with drawing deal with lines symbolizing speech and action, motion, p