be made palpable to the pupil, and convincingly displayed, should be among the agencies in the art-education given at normal schools; and such lectures should be given by art-masters of the greatest experience and ripest skill. A great part of the work of normal students should be in designing examples of lessons to be given on the black board to children, taking a given object, and setting it to the simplest proportions, so that it may be well drawn; and, thus prepared, it should be given by one of the students to the whole school. Each should have such an exercise every week, and every week one student [be] selected to give a lesson to the others. In addition to this elementary work, an hour each week ought to be given to drawing in light and shade from the solid form, so that the student may acquire at least more knowledge of drawing than will ever be expected of him in the schools he may have to teach. Unless every normal school has a drawing-class room, fitted for such study, and well furnished with models and examples, the education in drawing carried on in it will be very meagre and superficial. The studio in art is to art-study what the laboratory is to chemistry; without experiments and manipulation in both, the teaching must be too theoretical. In the normal school the drawing must be rapid and clear: for the teacher, who will presently have to correct thirty or forty bad drawings at least twice in half an hour, must draw quickly, or leave half the work undone; and must draw clearly, or be only half understood. Fine drawing is, therefore, most essential; and exercises which at first take half an hour to get through ought to be repeated until they can be done easily in ten minutes. Memory and dictation drawing are also of the highest importance to teachers, and should therefore form a due proportion in their studies. It is by no means essential that a power to draw very elaborate or difficult subjects should be possessed by the common-school teacher, but rather the power to draw simple things accurately, quickly, and without a moment's hesitation. That is what will give them the confidence of their pupils, and, what is quite as necessary, confidence in themselves. Leaving the specialties of the graded schools, I would like now to address to you some general observations on the work of all. I have put the time given to drawing in all the schools at two hours per week in the class-room; and, to make it efficient, as much time should be given outside. Little has been said about drawing on the blackboard by pupils, because, as the same remark would apply to all the grades, it has been left to be said now. Every pupil in all the classes and schools, with the exception of the three first classes of the primary schools, should draw every week upon a large scale on the blackboard; and to make this practical, when three lessons per week are given, one-third of the class should draw each lesson, so that, after three lessons,―i.e., the work of one week,- every pupil will have drawn on the board. That applies only to such exercises as consist of outline-drawing. Shading ought never to be attempted on a blackboard, nor exercises in color either. It is safer to keep the lessons a little below the capacities of the pupils than a little above them, and thus to expect better results in the way of clearness and finish than would be possible if the pupil had to struggle hard every new lesson to keep up to his fresh difficulties. And one principle must be ever remembered, viz., to set our faces steadily against the making of pretty or very elaborate drawings, which consume too much of the little time that can be given to the subject in day schools; also, to impress on the minds of the pupils that drawing is not done for its own sake, but learned as a means of understanding other things: it is illustrative rather than objective. In the discharge of my duties in the State of Massachusetts, I have drawn up a table of the arrangement of studies as described in this paper, so that those who may not have given as much time and attention to the subject as I have might see in a tabulated form what seemed to me to be the best course of study in all the graded schools. It is intended for circulation in the state through the board of education; but, in order that you might the more clearly comprehend my views upon the matter, I have had copies of this scheme struck off for distribution among those teachers who feel interested in the subject, and have put them into the hands of the officers of the association to be so distributed.* I have to ask your acceptance of them as my contribution towards the object of this meeting; not that I consider the scheme by any means complete, but suggest it, under our present circumstances, as a rough plan of operation in a new field, by one who, laboring in that field, has borne a fair share of the burden and the heat of the day in days gone by and in countries far away. I shall further trespass on your forbearance to listen to a few concluding remarks. After a year's experience in examining and inspecting the teaching of drawing in the schools of this country, I am convinced that there is here a great practical genius for education, which is competent to grasp and comprehend any new subject in a much shorter time than it takes to introduce it into older countries. Though the schools are not yet perfection, nor the whole of the teachers as highly trained as they might be, I have seen drawing taught in class-rooms in this state by teachers who never had a lesson in drawing in their lives, yet who taught it better, and incomparably better, than I ever saw it taught in any European country. I think that is something to say; and it fills me with the profoundest satisfaction to be able to say it. Though I have been studying this subject, and teaching the subject, all my working-life, it has been my good fortune to listen to teachers here who have taken it up as one of many subjects they were required to teach, and have seen them give drawing-lessons with a clearness, a precision, and practical skill on the black board, surpassing any teaching of the kind I ever saw. That is the ground of my confidence in the teachers' of our common schools being perfectly competent to teach drawing. There is yet an absence of the appliances with which to teach; but we shall get all these in time. It is not possible for this country to remain definitely behind other countries for a long time in any thing which is necessary to human progress, or which increases human skill; for, when that is the case, America will have ceased to exist. Some European countries have had a hundred, some fifty, and some thirty *The scheme is printed at the end of this paper. years' start of us in this subject; and that is handicapping us rather heavily in the race for distinction in art-education. Yet, in these days, progress does not depend so much upon the time we have been traveling as the rate of speed at which we run, and the straightness of the road along which we are progressing. From my own observation, I judge that the balance is considerably in our favor in these respects; and therefore, though we have yet something to learn, we have happily nothing to unlearn; and the prospects of our winning the race are so good, that I expect to live in the days when European travelers will come across the Atlantic to study the art-education of America. This, if it becomes a reality, will be brought about in our common schools more than by schools of art, and by regular teachers like you rather than special teachers like myself; for it is the education which children get that forms the character of a nation; and the demands of an art-loving people will at all times produce a race of ministering artists. Let the teaching of drawing in the public schools be sound, practical, and sensible, and art schools, museums and galleries will as inevitably come as that harvest follows seed-time. The foundation-stone of American liberty says that all men are born free and equal: as teachers, it is our business to see that this means freedom from ignorance, and equality with the best. The time-honored arts have not been the monopoly of a race or period: their features may have changed in revolving centuries; the theatre on which their excellence has been displayed has shifted from place to place; yet, wherever there has existed a happy combination of freedom, peace and prosperity, and love of education, there the arts have flourished, and shed lustre and glory upon the race and epoch which have been free, educated, and artistic. It falls legitimately within the righteous ambition of any nation to desire that its citizens shall be capable of exercising all the nobler faculties of human nature, among which is a reverence for and love of the beautiful in nature and art, in the revelations of Almighty Power in natural phenomena, and in the manifestation of artistic skill in the accumulated monuments of art; for such a characteristic will in all times increase the happiness, whilst it adds to the prosperity, of the nation. Let us reverently hope that a country which has fulfilled some of the conditions of this distinction may also reap some of its rewards. As the greatest living writer on art has expressed it, "We may abandon the hope, or, if you like the words better, we may disdain the temptation, of the pomp and grace of Italy in her youth. For us there can be no more the throne of marble, for us no more the vault of gold: but for us there is the loftier and lovelier privilege of bringing the power and charm of art within the reach of the humble and the poor; and, as the magnificence of past ages failed by its narrowness and its pride, ours may prevail and continue by its universality and its lowliness. "The paintings of Raphael and of Buonarotti gave force to the falsehoods of superstition, and majesty to the imagination of sin; but our art may have for its task to inform the soul with truth, and touch the heart with compassion. "The steel of Toledo and the silk of Genoa did but give strength to oppress ion, and lustre to pride.. Let it be for our furnaces and our looms, as they have already richly earned, still more abundantly to bestow comfort on the indigent, civilization on the rude, and to dispense through the peaceful homes of nations the grace and the preciousness of simple adornment and useful possession." The art of the future will recognize no feasts of the gods, nor martyrdoms of saints. "We have no need of sensuality, no place for superstition or costly insolence." But there is in us, as there has been in all great epochs of the world's history, a yearning after the beautiful in thought and language, and form and color; and the country in which love of art is the most general, and its practice in the highest branches the most thorough, shall now, as in the past, be the representative to all future ages of the civilization of mankind. COMMONWEALTH OF MASSACHUSETTS. [SEAL.] BOARD OF EDUCATION, STATE HOUSE. Department of Art Education. Scheme of Instruction in Drawing suggested for graded |