child's power
of observation exceeds belief. I have seen a bowl placed high above
the line of sight of a class of fifty senior boys, each one of whom
(his memory being haunted, I suppose, by some diagram which he had
once copied) drew it as if he were looking into it from above. Not
one of those boys could see the bowl as it really was, or rather
as it really was to be seen. A child who had never drawn a stroke
in his life, but whose perceptive faculties had not been deadened
by education, would have sketched the bowl more correctly than
any of those quasi-experts. And with the wasting of the power of
observation, the executive power is gradually lost; for perception
is ever interpenetrating, reinforcing, and stimulating expression;
and when the eye is blind, the hand, however skilful its mere
manipulation may be, necessarily falters and loses its cunning.

Four or five years ago, had one entered an elementary school while
drawing was being taught, such a lesson as I have just described
would have been in progress in ninety-nine cases out of every
hundred. Since then a systematic warfare has been waged by the Board
against the "flat copy"; and though it is still very far from
extinct, there is now perhaps an actual majority of schools in which
its use has been discontinued. But the number of schools in which
drawing from the object is effectively taught, though increasing
steadily, is still small. In those schools, indeed, the results are
surprisingly good,--so good as to justify, not only the new gospel of
drawing from the object, but also the whole gospel of education
through self-reliance and self-expression. But elsewhere there has
been but little improvement, except so far as it may be better to
draw from an object without guidance, or with quite ineffective
guidance, than to draw from a flat copy. In some schools the formula
or "tip" is beginning to take the place of the flat copy. There is a
formula for the tulip, a formula for the snowdrop, a formula for the
daffodil, and so on; and the children draw from these formulae while
the actual flowers are before them and they are making believe to
reproduce them. In other schools an object is placed before the
class, and the teacher draws this for them on the blackboard,
explaining to them in detail how it ought to be drawn; and when he
has finished, the children pretend to draw the object, but really
copy his blackboard copy of it. In this, as in other matters, the