Art education

Now that I have kids, I often wonder why we stop drawing, playing in the mud, building forts, having imaginary friends and so on. Perhaps it's difficult for growing minds to make the distinction between childish behavior and child-like activities so both get left behind as we grow up.

I was looking for something on the Internet today when I stumbled upon an article on doodling on about.com that has some relevance to the topic. Here is an excerpt from the article:

Usually we have a limited visual vocabulary that we have at our disposal; depending on the age at which our artistic development stalled. Children learn a set of formal symbols – the face, house, sun, moon, flower, tree, bird, fish, and basic geometric shapes – that are established in early primary school. They might add more complex forms later, but rarely learn observational drawing. In the early teens, when realistic expression and detail become important, children keenly feel an inadequacy in their ability to draw realistically, and stop drawing. People who stopped drawing very early will tend to limit their doodles to repetitive geometric forms and the learned symbols from their childhood. Those that continued drawing in their teens will include more involved patterns and complex symbolic representations, while people who maintained an interest in creative expression may create intricate doodles and complete drawings.

Now, I'm not saying that kids need to have training in the arts so that they can be good doodlers when they grow up, but I think ongoing education in the arts is important. My kids may decide they have no interest in art when they grow up and that's fine - but I want it to be a choice, not just something that happens.