Visual arts are an essential educational discipline, necessary for a normal mental and physical development of the individual. Man has felt the need to create from the very beginning of his existence. Of course his purpose was not the creation of artworks, but rather satisfying his innate creative urges with the materials at hand. Art has naturally transformed and played various roles through the ages. Art education as a school subject has significantly progressed in its goal of developing a child’s ability to express forms and create a visual product. In the past century, the student has hence “walked the path” from bare stencil work, imitating shapes and copying to higher cognitive functions and has thus now achieved a deeper internal understanding of the images he is creating. With the help of his knowledge of art and with the foundation of his own experience, the student creates his own world of visual expression. The role of the teacher is not a simple one: to know a child and his prior art education, and to be emphatically involved in his physical and mental development is not an easy task considering the large number of students in the classroom. This is proven by cases in which teachers mark the children’s artworks differently as a consequence of not knowing the children themselves. In the future it would be necessary to decrease the number of students per class and increase the number of weekly hours dedicated to visual arts. Art itself does not directly influence art education in schools, where classes take place according to the established guidelines of the curriculum. The teacher uses creative imagination to elicit creative artistic expression from the pupil and encourages various different forms for such expression. Hence I find interesting the reflection on the comparison of adult and children’s ‘art’ and their perception of the world. A child is actually not creating art for the sake of art, but is rather creating an artistic expression that is unique to him as an individual. An artist's style is shaped throughout his continuous development, while a pupil does not think about the fact that he is creating art, but is rather building foundations which will help him showcase his inner world as well as the outside world that he is observing. A child's expression requires a great deal of understanding and knowledge of child psychology (hence Vygotsky and Piaget's cognitive theories are used).
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