d
chequer drawing, now condemned as injurious to eyesight and of little
value.

When children see anything rich in colour the general cry is "Let's
paint it," which is their way of taking in the beauty. We should not,
says Froebel, give them paints and brushes inconsiderately, to throw
about, but give them the help they need, and he describes quite a
sensible lesson given to boys "whose own painting did not seem to paint
them long."

Teachers who want real help in the art training of children should read
the excellent papers by Miss Findlay in _School and Life_, where we are
told that we must rescue the term "design" from the limited uses to
which it is often condemned in the drawing class, viz. the construction
of pleasing arrangements of colour and form for surface decoration. "We
shall use it in its full popular significance in constructive work....
The term will cover building houses, making kettles, laying out streets,
planning rooms, dressing hair, as well as making patterns for cushion
covers and cathedral windows.... In thus widening our art studies, we
shall be harking back in a slight degree to the kind of training that in
past ages produced the great masters.... Giotto designed his Campanile
primarily for the bells that were to summon the Florentines to their
cathedral; the Venetians wanted facades for their palaces, and made
facades to delight their eyes; the Japanese have wanted small furniture
for their small rooms, and have developed wonderful skill and taste in
designing it. Neither art nor science can remain long afloat in high
abstract regions above the needs and interests of human life. To quote
A.H. Clough:

'A Cathedral Pure and Perfect.
Built by that only Law, that Use be suggester of Beauty;
Nothing concealed that is, done, but all things done to adornment;
Meanest utilities seized as occasions to grace and embellish.'"

If this is true of the interests of the professional artist, much more
must it be true of the art training of the child. We must not then
despise the rough and ready productions of a child, nor force upon him a
standard for which he is not ready.

Before any other construction is possible to him, a child can _make_
with sand, and this is a constant joy, from the endless puddings that
are turned out of patty pans, up to such models as that of the whole
"Isle of Wight" with its tunnelled cliffs and system of railways, made
by an ex-Kindergarten boy as yet innocent of