Children's Art and Spirituality

Rhoda Kellogg (in Meyers & Grey, 1983) was a psychologist who maintained that children's art contained elements of structure, form and meaning that have universal meanings (pp.67-74). Drawing from Jungian archetypal psychology, she maintains that children's art contains similar "gestalts" or structural elements, one of which is the mandala that is sacred to many spiritual traditions and which symbolizes the wholeness of the soul. Curiously, few parents would catch onto this sort of symbolic imagery, in part because parents tend to reward children for creating art that resembles something that is close to a consensual vision of what reality is and how it is illustrated.  This is also because parents tend to place little significance on the seemingly "random" squiggle shapes which compose early children's art. Mistaking these random scribbles for "misguided" attempts to create presumably "real" objects in the world, people tend to view children's art as underdeveloped visions of adult reality, rather than seeing the seeming randomness of children's art to be significant in and of itself.
    By looking at children's art as innately predisposed with profound structural elements, Kellogg seems to prepare the way for future educators such as Tobin Amon and Robert Coles to explore the "spirituality" of children. But I think another aspect which might get overlooked is how Kellogg reverses the view that children are only "undeveloped" adults. In seriously considering the creations of children in their own right, Kellogg manages to restore adult curiosity toward children's ways of knowing. One might think that children's ways of knowing are somehow underdeveloped "versions" of adult seeing, but another way of approaching this is to see adults as fully indoctrinated into ways of seeing that are entrenched in systems of culture and power. An example of this might be that of a tree.
      Most students by a certain age (say, 10), are able to trace what appears to be the rough outlines of a tree: brown trunk and a normally circular "green" blob of leaves and foliage. Do these things even resemble actual trees? For adults, the circular green top and slender brown trunk signify a tree, even though the image might not even correspond to what trees look like. But the point is that scholars such as Kellogg would suggest that it isn't the child who labels the shapes of the branches and foliage as a "tree". Rather, adults confer upon the children such labels, which are usually enforced by the shared culture. I say that the green blob and long brown trunk collectively make a word "tree", yet this image hardly corresponds to what an "actual" tree looks like. However, once one examines the images the children are creating in and of themselves, they discover profound things about them, such as the ability for children to make many things from one central circle.


Myers, M. & Gray, J (1983) Theory and Practice in the Teaching of Composition: Processing Distancing, and Modeling. Urbana, Ill: National Council of Teachers of English