The world in a drawing (L'Unità, 10 January 2011)
It also spoke during the program Vittorio Giacopini
Page3 (Radio3). Bet you can listen to podcasts
HERE. _____________________
Why kids draw like that? What is the relationship between seeing and thinking? An elementary school teacher describes her experience in the field. "Why do children draw like that?" he asked Rudolf Arnheim in "development" of the book Art and Visual Perception (1954). To put it another way, regardless of their technical skills, the mastery of tools and materials, in childhood you draw what you see or what you know? What is the relationship between seeing and thinking, between creation and knowledge? This is the heart of the long question, on which point of time to clarify, because if you understand the child, you will understand even better the man of whom he is not the promise. Approach that we find it The child and his art. Ninety-six thesis (The melangolo, pp. 79, € 16.00), a collection of reflections of a primary school teacher edited by Mario Gennari who was his student and now teaches General Education and Philosophy of human formation at the University of Genoa.
starting from man to arrive at the thought. Cesare Ghezzi taught from 1958 to 1995 in San Quirico in Val Polcevera, a small town near Genoa, fueling his work as an educator continuous study and theoretical study. Examples of this are cross-references and comparisons never slavish or peaceful with the theories of some of the greatest thinkers of the last century: Sartre, Arnheim, Merleau-Ponty, Wittgenstein, Gombrich. Someone is even older, like Socrates. His aphorisms are full and accompany the observations gained on the field, those ideas born from the trial daily. "What the child sees or has seen" No, we read in the aphorism 30, "is transformed when he recalls. The images are loaded with new emotions ',' every child, "continues" builds a world and its design makes him known ": it is deduced that the activity painting is certainly a useful tool in the identification, understanding and definition of things, the investigation of the relationships that bind them together and create a progressive order of complexity. But it is also and above all, an education think the ultimate goal is to build a relationship with the method of external and internal world that can accompany the "process of change, development, growth, maturation and transformation of the child "(thesis # 10). Only in this light it is possible to understand a thesis (No. 66) which states that the watch had anything less than the seeing, meaning the first time how the simple act of perception and the second involving a process as previously thought. He continues, "seeing is not thinking. Thinking is not to be, but is really exist. " Exist, that live in the knowledge and freedom.
question remains what is the role of the teacher. Cesare Ghezzi speaks first of the features that must have: professionalism and insight would serve for nothing if they were not accompanied by gentleness and respect, especially to all that the child has not yet had the opportunity to meet (thesis 50). The educator must then get in touch and communicate with his class by creating a climate of trust. But this is like freedom: "I should give it to her. Trust creates the conditions for dynamic communication through authenticity "(thesis 51). There. It really is (still) possible to follow such an approach? It will be in line with the ministerial program? Certainly not with those up to the fifties that were the subject of the thesis of Ghezzi, discussed in 1994. Those of 1923 because they embraced the idealistic thesis ("funny the first attempts of the child with the drawing must be respected and never corrected), those of 1945, the positivist thesis (" The first experiments should be integrated with exercises from the truth to change gradually the distortions "), not to mention those of 1955 (which are a confusing merging the first two).
last note. The book has an appendix that brings together works created over the years by his students. What better summary (visual) experience of great value, waiting to be rediscovered? After all, when Thomas Moore was asked to prove the existence of his hand, the philosopher did nothing but show his audience his right limb. Ça va sans rien say.
Silvia Santirosi
