“Look at my drawing “beamed my friend’s 5 year old girl, holding colored picture of burger with lettuce and tomatoes shapes and colors. Instant reaction to that good-looking burger was “wow “and I knew we have another masterpiece going on fridge.
It’s not that her painting wasn’t amazing or I doubt her skill or potential, but I got curious to know as how long she has been practicing this skill called drawing and painting.
“Oh, she used to scribble and doodle at home ,which didn’t make much sense as her experience with art ,and look what a great art work is produced in her first class” my friend shared. When I tried to understand from her daughter as how she reached to this beautiful burger drawing, how was her process, what she enjoyed observing while drawing, she looked at me in surprise and said “I just followed teacher’s instructions and copied whatever lines she asked us to draw and in the end it was BURGER”

As we looked around at other kids coming out of the class, we saw almost similar burger drawing with little color and backdrop differences.
I sat their smiling with my mind racing to all my old learning’s as an artist and a designer.
I recalled a dialogue about childhood art with Professor MARVIN BARTEL on Teaching Creativity.
As he stated “I don’t show example to copy as examples are like crutches that children are afraid to abandon ,besides art is a skill learned by observation, imagination and experiences(memories).It’s when we ask them more thinking question about their actual experiences, observation and imaginations ,we will get them beyond the stereotypes.”
So, what are these art classes doing? Are they catering to parent’s ego and wishes of child coming out with good-looking masterpiece or are they authentically working on child’s observation skills to start with? Well. Observation skills, for sure, are considered at classes—observe and copy teacher’s version of burger.
Why are, we parents, so obsessed with results from a single class, why do we not understand that art is right-brain learning skill which can’t be approached like standardized copying learning method .Why can we provide kids opportunity to practice dealing with open –ended questions by doing projects that depend on making observations of the way things really are rather than following a teacher’s formula.
Can you imagine what disservice we are doing to our kids with copying and rote learning? We are stripping them of opportunity to develop their brains that can cope up with new and challenging situations in life and more so, reaching their authentic self.
All our children are so conditioned in producing parent pleasing and approval seeking art work, that they find any approach to observation skills development as roadblock to their instant gratification of producing good-looking work by copying steps.
All the copying and following not only kills their observation skills but they also miss on developing on their creativity and innovation thinking quotient. Most of these kids don’t develop tools to carry forward their drawing and painting skills and as adults we still draw the same tree(looking like broccoli),bird ,house(even if we are asked to draw our dream house)etc.
Why not explore creativity and imagination, the way it should be –with OBSERVATION & THINKING QUESTIONS.