The View from the Crib

When a child of one scribbles, aimless lines and swirls are the only result. Then, in the child's second year, a curious drawing appears: a circle marked by four dots or lines.

"Aren't you cute! You've drawn a man!'' says mother, ignoring the fact that the "arms" may be waving from the ears and the "legs" are dangling from the chin.

This sort of remark infuriates Mrs. Rhoda Kellogg, whose 35 years as a student and collector of children's art have convinced her that childhood's first great defeat often occurs at that moment. Giving "meaning" to the scribbles forces the child to accept a copycat view? of the world, she thinks. Sooner or later, it will cost him his natural freedom of expression. But "adults feel that anything that belongs to the child is no good," says Mrs. Kellogg. "If there's one thing they have to do, it's get rid of childhood."

Vocabulary of Drawings. To advance her studies, Mrs. Kellogg, 64, has gathered half a million children's drawings into her San Francisco house. The collection-by far the world's biggest-is mostly American, but also ranges through 32 foreign countries to places as far away as Nepal. Mrs. Kellogg's careful catalogues of the drawings provide massive evidence that children everywhere rely on a universal vocabulary of scribbles in their early drawings. She has noted 20 basic scribbles in six classic forms: cross, X, square, circle, triangle, closed free form.

The development of the scribbles into art's higher language is governed by "muscle play," Mrs. Kellogg says; the child discovers the circle when his arm tires of outward movement and he makes the corresponding line back toward himself. Then, by combining one form and another, the infant artist makes further discoveries about order and balance, all of them intuitive, and all drawn from imagination rather than observation.

Thus it is that the "man" is eventually drawn. But children know that arms and legs do not extend from the head, Mrs. Kellogg notes, and, if they tried to draw a body, would not picture it that way. The figure is not a "man" at all, but a mandala (Sanskrit for magic circle), the circle-in-four that anthropologists have found central in design throughout history and a source of proof in much of C. G. Jung's "racial psychology."

Bad Adults. Mrs. Kellogg is wary of crystallizing her notions about child art into the language of cultural psychology -for example, the cultural-memory explanation that Jungians would give to the circle and mandala. But she is firm in be lieving that when adults invade the child's art world, a pernicious pattern results: the adult demands conformity to his rigid standards, grows impatient with the child's reluctance to depart his fine mandala world, shows anger. "Such human hos tility makes children into bad adults," Mrs. Kellogg says. "If we had more art and better art, there wouldn't be any of this 'going back to the womb.' " To gath er evidence for her beliefs, she has taught some 10,000 children in 35 nursery schools, traveled to every corner of the world, gathered so much child art that it is slowly pushing her out of her four-story house.

To teach her lesson, Mrs. Kellogg cam paigns ceaselessly against coloring books, against "art lessons" before the age of ten, against art teachers who reward copying and discourage imagination, and against the parent's temptation to cry out: "It's a man!" "All children are natural artists," Mrs. Kellogg says, "so why not let them be? Their art has a natural esthetic qual ity. All of it is beautiful, and none of it is ugly."

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