Secret Games
By Wendy Ewald ’74
A couple of years ago, my son Michael was tested to determine
whether he should be placed in pre-kindergarten or kindergarten.
When asked to make adrawing of a man, he included his heart
and soul. The testers had never seen a four-year-old make
such an unusual drawing of a human being. Despite my protests
—I was worried about Michael being the youngest kid in
his class —he was placed in kindergarten rather than
pre-kindergarten.
Wendy Ewald ’74—MacArthur
Fellow,
photographer, and educator—spoke at
Antioch College in 2003 as part of the
College’s Sesquicentennial celebration.
There are ten kindergartens in his large publicschool district,
and outside each classroom the teachers had mounted cut-outs
of various things—apples, stars, or animals—with
the name of each child written inside the cut-outs, so the
new kindergartners could find their rooms. Each class had
a unique symbol. My son’s was an owl. But the owl decorations
identifying his classroom were dark brown. The names of the
children, written in black on these dark backgrounds, were
very difficult to read, especially for five-year-olds just
learning to pick out the letters of their names. Inside the
classroom, the teacher had taken the time to affix small owls,
again with the students’ names written on them, above
each of their cubbies. But the owls were placed high on the
wall, virtually impossible for someone of kindergarten height
to read. To little children already versed in our culture’s
visual rhetoric, this well-intentioned effort must have seemed
misguided, incoherent, and graphically illiterate. Nice try,
but it didn’t work: they could barely see it, and they
certainly couldn’t decipher it.
We all know that we live in a visual culture. We’re
constantly being warned about the negative affects on children
of much of what they see, but for some reason, after children
grow beyond infancy, we don’t pay much attention to creating
exciting visual environments for them. Once their nursery
school days are over, we stop engaging with them in visual
play. Programmed arts and crafts, yes—but very seldom
do “art enrichment” classes approach the sophistication
that kids might genuinely respond to, the way they do to the
visual complexity that is already in them and all around them.
My art has grown out of an attempt to pay attention to our
visual surroundings, and the deep need to articulate and communicate
something relevant about our lives. My methods have evolved
gradually during 30 years of working with children, mostly
between the ages of eight and 13, thinking about how we learn,
and how we express ourselves with images. My work as an artist
is intertwined with my work as a teacher.
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