Making things is an essential part of human nature. We start to create very early in life and even under difficult conditions some of our activity is creative. We cannot escape the need to create, and although we are often disappointed in our efforts, and frustrated, we go on trying.

Creative feeling is not confined to the graphic arts. Some people find fulfilment for their creative impulses in writing, in music, in sport, in making a home or organizing a business, in cooking or teaching. All these are ways of creating and there are many others. Most of us take in more with our eyes than with our other senses, however, and so our creative efforts are most likely to be in fields adjoining those of the graphic arts. Nearly everyone has, at some time in life, the task of selecting and relating the furnishing of his home and of choosing the clothes he will wear. When these things are well selected, they are an expression of their owner's personality and will bring him lasting satisfaction. If art and craft teaching in school did no more than train children to do this in adult life, it would have earned a place in the school timetable. It has a larger part to play, however.

Art is a language, a means of communication. It can say things which cannot easily be said in words. A shape is most easily described by drawing. A colour is most easily visualized when seen. These concepts of colour, shape, line, tone and texture are the individual words of the language. Just as we put words together to convey ideas in speech and writing, so we put colours and shapes together to convey our joy or our horror in the forms and colours themselves, or in the things they represent, realistically or symbolically. For the adult artist and for the child, this is a way of dealing with life, of rejoicing in the wonder of what he sees in the world around him, or in his mind's eye. Or it may be that this is a way of putting outside himself the conflicts arising from unpleasant experience. We absorb experience and then need to give it out in some way. For children this giving out is sometimes in the form of play, sometimes in terms of drawing and painting. For many adults the giving out is in the form of talk. Different kinds of experience need different forms of expression, however, and if we cease to use graphic forms of expression, we shall soon cease to feel emotion about what we see. This is, in fact, what has happened to the majority of people, who go about without seeing what is around them. We stop seeing when we leave childhood behind, and are much the poorer. One of the tasks of art and craft teaching is to make children so much aware of the world around them and so much in the habit of looking, that they go on looking when they grow up.

Our individual use of the language of the graphic arts is, like our use of speech, an expression of personality. Personality is something which educationists have long sought to develop in children, for the man with a developed personality is whole, integrated and mature, and this is evident to his fellows. Personality manifests itself through creative activities of every kind, and the art and craft education we give children should provide them with sufficient skill to use the graphic arts as a personal language, an expression of personality.

We must also give children such opportunities of work in art and craft that they develop a real appreciation of good craftsmanship and good design. Then the majority, instead of the minority of people, will reject the poorly made and poorly designed things which fill our shops today. Good craftsmanship is something which can best be recognized through personal experience of the craft. When we recognize it, we can share with the maker the feeling of skill in the making, the feeling of using a good tool well, the joy of finding exacdy the right shape or combination of materials. If we have some knowledge of craftsmanship, the things around us—furniture, pottery, fabrics and so on—give us a new pleasure, born of a share in the knowledge of their manufacture.

What about good design? What is this? Fashions change and what is considered good in one age is disliked in the next. Even so there are standards which can be deduced from the study of the works of fine craftsmanship of the past, where fashion is a less important factor. In the first place, a well-designed article must do the job for which it was designed. A well-designed teapot for example, must pour well, be comfortable to hold, stand firmly and be easy to clean. Secondly, good design requires an appreciation of materials. A teapot may be made of clay or metal, but only a bad designer would make the design of one resemble the design of the other. Both of these aspects of good design are to be found in the work of engineers. Good design also involves certain relationships of proportion, materials, colour, tone, form, line and texture, which may be inherent in the function or materials of the thing made, but which may be more arbitrary. These relationships have been chosen, by artists and craftsmen, sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously, as long as art and craft have existed. We can, in general, only come to recognize them through experience. Lastly, well-designed things are an expression of the personality of their designer. This is especially true of handmade objects, although modern designers are producing personal designs for machine-made things.

We teach art and craft for these reasons then:

We wish to train children in the ability to select and relate colours, shapes, tones, lines and textures, in pictures and designs and in furnishing and clothing.

We wish to develop, in children, sufficient skill in drawing, painting and craftwork to make this, for each of them, a means of expressing personality. We also wish to develop to the full whatever natural creative ability each child possesses.

We wish to help children to enjoy to the full the natural and the man-made world around them, and to help them to appreciate the work of artists and craftsmen.