Art criticism

Caroline Pratt on children criticizing the art their peers have made:

Since we were not interested in turning out young Picassos but only in giving children the freedom of all kinds of materials and media for the expression of their ideas, we had on occasion to discourage these young critics, who were likely to be too forthright for the good of the children whom they criticized. One youngster in the Sevens would not touch paints for a month when the class had laughed at him for painting his locomotive pink! I sometimes feared that if we discovered a genius, his contemporaries would shame him into becoming an academician, such is the conservatism of children.

Caroline Pratt, I Learn from Children: An Adventure in Progressive Education . 1948. (New York: Grove, 2014).

A related post
Caroline Pratt on waste in education

[“The Sevens”: seven-year-olds.]