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 geography lessons.

The child then who is making, especially making for use, is to a certain extent developing himself as an artist.

The little boys at Keilhau were well provided with sand, moss, etc., to use with their building blocks, and it was a former Keilhau boy who suggested to his old master that some kind of sand-box would make a good plaything for the children in his new Kindergarten.  Miss Wiggin tells us that indirectly we owe the children’s sand-heaps in the public parks to Froebel, since these were the result of a suggestion made by Frau Schrader to the Empress Frederick, and the idea was carried out during her husband’s too brief reign.

Another very early “making” is the arranging of furniture for shops, carriages, trains, and the “ships upon the stairs,” which made bright pictures in Stevenson’s memory.