Rationalism and empiricism: contrasting approaches to drawing as education reform in the late nineteenth century

Abstract

Distinct from studies that discuss art education and the formation of a visual culture, this article compares the different uses and ends which drawing served in Ontario and the United States in last two decades of the nineteenth century. Drawing in Ontario and the US represented differing systems of knowledge and truth claims that were vying for prominence as a foundation for education in the late nineteenth century: Froebelian rationalist philosophy in Ontario and empirical positivist science in the US. This article identifies the networks associated with the different uses that drawing served in education reform. A common interest in Froebelian philosophy and kindergarten classes linked Ontario educator James L. Hughes with educators in Boston. This provided access to the innovations in the teaching of drawing that were being made by Walter Smith. Smith was a key figure in the process of establishing and promoting the importance of drawing, industrial drawing and design in Britain, United States, Ontario and Brazil in the last half of the nineteenth century. Another network was centered around G. Stanley Hall and the empirical positivist science of education that underpinned large-scale studies of children’s drawings. The methods that Hall and his collaborators employed to study children’s drawings were critical to the making of child studies in America. This article contends that neither of the examples of the uses of drawing analysed in this article served a liberatory purpose.