Have you ever wanted to Paint and Draw….?

I was recently talking to Helen, the secretary at Cairn’s rd Baptist church where I run an art class about experiences of art at school.  (I’ve already written at some length about this sort of thing in a previous post but this is such a classic example of the sort of wrongheaded and discouraging things that art teachers say at school that I though it merited a post in it’s own right.) Anyway Helen, aged 6 or 7 was drawing a picture of , I believe, a rose when the teacher held it up to the class and said “Class, this is an example of how not to do it”.  I was slack jawed with disbelief when I heard that one I can tell you.  At that age what on earth does it matter what it looks like and, anyway surely there’s a better way of doing it than holding it up in front of the whole class.   Inevitably after that Helen decided that she was “no good at art” and didn’t really  take any interest in the subject after that.