Herbert Read - Views On Education

Views On Education

Herbert Read developed a strong interest in the subject of education and particularly in art education. Read´s anarchism was influenced by William Godwin, Peter Kropotkin and Max Stirner. Read "became deeply interested in children’s drawings and paintings after having been invited to collect works for an exhibition of British art that would tour allied and neutral countries during the Second World War. As it was considered too risky to transport across the Atlantic works of established importance to the national heritage, it was proposed that children’s drawings and paintings should be sent instead. Read, in making his collection, was unexpectedly moved by the expressive power and emotional content of some of the younger artist’s works. The experience prompted his special attention to their cultural value, and his engagement of the theory of children’s creativity with seriousness matching his devotion to the avant-garde. This work both changed fundamentally his own life’s work throughout his remaining twenty-five years and provided art education with a rationale of unprecedented lucidity and persuasiveness. Key books and pamphlets resulted: Education through Art (Read, 1943); The Education of Free Men (Read, 1944); Culture and Education in a World Order (Read, 1948); The Grass Read, (1955); and Redemption of the Robot (1970)".

Read "elaborated a socio-cultural dimension of creative education, offering the notion of greater international understanding and cohesiveness rooted in principles of developing the fully balanced personality through art education. Read argued in Education through Art that "every child, is said to be a potential neurotic capable of being saved from this prospect, if early, largely inborn, creative abilities were not repressed by conventional Education. Everyone is an artist of some kind whose special abilities, even if almost insignificant, must be encouraged as contributing to an infinite richness of collective life. Read’s newly expressed view of an essential ‘continuity’ of child and adult creativity in everyone represented a synthesis’ the two opposed models of twentieth-century art education that had predominated until this point...Read did not offer a curriculum but a theoretical defence of the genuine and true. His claims for genuineness and truth were based on the overwhelming evidence of characteristics revealed in his study of child art...From 1946 until his death in 1968 he was president of the Society for Education in Art (SEA), the renamed ATG, in which capacity he had a platform for addressing UNESCO...On the basis of such representation Read, with others, succeeded in establishing the International Society for Education through Art (INSEA) as an executive arm of UNESCO in 1954.""