Creative Growth: Why Kids Blossom When We Nurture Instead of Teach

Picasso famously said, “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.” Yet the sad reality is that lots of art teachers spend their time teaching kids how to draw like adults.

One especially notorious practice—widely criticised by art educators is the so-called “stick-figure drawing” method. In Chinese, there's a distinct name for it "简笔画”(Jian Bi Hua), which simply means simplified drawing. It's quick and easy as ABC, and was developed to help people quickly master the sill of drawing something that resembled how it look without having to learn advanced artistic skills. Whilst this type of teaching method are no longer popular as more and more people recognise their drawbacks, many parents may not realise the classes they’ve so carefully chosen for their children are essentially a fancier version of the same thing. With added various materials and complex presentations, it’s simply “Jian Bi Hua” dressed up in an “artsy” disguise, which I would like to call “Follow-Me Drawing.”

The Pitfalls of “Follow-Me Drawing”

Take this example above. Let's imagine how these little rabbit were created by little hands: During class, the teacher walked the children through each step: first the outline of the bunny’s face, then the ears, then how to paint it with watercolours so it’s bright and tidy. At the end of the session, every child had produced an Instagram-worthy bunny. The kids were proud, the teacher was pleased with the “results,” and the parents felt they were getting their money’s worth—my child cannot produce something like by herself at home, she finally learned it!

Some parents do notice that while the art their children brought home look impressive, their artwork made at home still showcased how they usually "doodle".

The follow-me method, though criticised, does have some advantages. For example, it teaches children how to be patient and how to follow instructions. It can even help young children to develop their hand muscles and eye-hand coordination skills. It's also super beneficial for the art centre from a profit and sustainability perspective as well. Think about it: after they teach the kids how to draw the bunny face, the kids still need to learn how to draw the bunny body, the sitting bunny, the running bunny, the bunny from the back, and the bunny from the side... After the bunny, there are a infinite things they can teach: monkeys, lions, giraffes, horses, fish… It's like a money machine, and parents just needs to feed the machine with money to make sure their children can learn everything they need to learn and eventually becomes a master of "draw it all".

The list of reasons why this approach may not be so well is also long, and here are some of them:

Let's first look at the definition of the word"teaching". What is teaching? Teaching is about “I’ll tell you what you don't know so you know what you didn't know”.

But art is not science or knowledge, it's an innate ability for the human. The children have already had these artistic talents when they were born, and extra instructions are just ways to tell the kids not to follow their instinctual ideas but duplicate what others's way of seeing and their ideal worlds.

Children, especially those under the age of seven, haven’t yet developed strong critical thinking skills; They have an imaginary world which overlap the outside world. When they make art, it's their way to express their inner experiences. They are not interested in replicating what they see with their eyes, they only have one goal, which is to recreate what they see in their mind and what they felt with their heart. Each and every artwork produced by children has its own distinct artistic flair, and there's nothing need to be taught. They already know.

They don't intend to exaggerate, they just make what they find important bigger on the paper. They are not interest in what colour represent what mood, yet they effortlessly use line and color to reflect their feelings. Their art is simply unfiltered expression of how they feel.

In “Follow-Me” teaching, it shifts children's focus toward “Am I doing it right?”, which may take them away from expressing their own ideas. Over time, they would become wary of making mistakes, and eventually lost the ability to draw anything that they haven't been taught.

On top of that, the “follow me” method reduces a child’s ability to see and feel the world around them. The rabbit drawn on the white board by a teacher reflect how teacher’s see the rabbit, or in most cases, how the teacher copy someone else’s simplified version of the rabbits. When the child ignore their idea a rabbit and replicate somebody else’s drawings, the rabbit changes from a vibrant, living creature to a lifeless symbol. As these types of practice accumulates, children may find themselves lost curiosity and sensitivity to the things in the world. Just like how a novel can not touch your heart when it's produced by a writer who can only imitates others due to absence of sensibility and inspiration from his own life, and artwork without the real experience from life is like a person without a soul.

“I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn’t say any other way—things I had no words for.”Georgia O’Keeffe

A Girl and Her running Horses

The above drawing is from a girl from my art class. The way she arranged the horses shows her ability in observation—one horse partially hides another, which hides the next, and so on. She used simple shapes for faces, necks, and bodies, but not in the stiff manner of an adult’s “Jian Bi Hua.” If you use "looking realistic" as a standard, it may not be a good drawing. However, the drawing is full of life, the sweeping lines and exuberant energy capture the feel of horses in motion.

Picasso said, “When I draw a bull, I’m not drawing a bull—I’m drawing its wild spirit.”

As art educators, we should protect children’s artistic instincts. After all, as Picasso endorsed, the best art doesn’t come from following rules—it comes from staying true to the wild, untamed spirit of a child.