F. Graeme Chalmers

Art, Boys, and the Boy Scout Movement: Lord Baden-Powell

Robert Stephenson Smyth Baden-Powell (1857–1941), founder of the Boy Scout Movement in 1907, was a British military hero during the Boer War. Within an ethos and era of empire-building, athleticism, soldier-heroes and the pursuit of “manliness,” Baden-Powell valued the arts and adapted his artistic skill to his wartime and Scouting activities. His own sketches and paintings are accomplished, and he exhibited his work in India, Southern Africa, and London— including sending a sculpture to the Royal Academy and regularly receiving payment for sketches that he sent to The Graphic magazine. He took his friends to exhibitions at the Royal Academy, visited the Paris Salon, and wrote about the importance for boys of learning to draw. Most of his publications are illustrated with his own line drawings, or those by his friends in the London Sketch Club. Observation and perceptual awareness were requirements for successful scouting, and he claimed that there was no better way to develop those skills than by drawing. Thus at a time when the practice of the arts is often seen as “feminine,” and boys may resist participating in art education, it is important to examine Baden-Powells “masculine” use of the arts and his emphasis on learning through doing. In his study of the Boy Scouts, the YMCA, and their forerunners in the United States, Macleod (1983) makes an important point that “Although the behaviour of boys and their leaders in voluntary associations inevitably differed from what occurred in public schools, the patterns are nonetheless revealing because the boys and men were acting more freely than school pupils and teachers” (p. xvi).

Crafts, Boys, Ernest Thompson Seton, and the Woodcraft Movement

This article examines early influences on art education for boys (Chalmers & Dancer, 2007) in areas traditionally labeled as crafts. Under review is the work of Ernest Thompson Seton, artist, naturalist, storyteller, author, philosopher, crusader for and supporter of indigenous American Indian ways of knowing, and a co-founder of the Boy Scouts of America. Within a discussion of indigeneity and woodcraft, this article contributes to the study of masculinities and art education. Seton’s Woodcraft Indians and the Boy Scouts of America were early 20th-century responses to what Pinar (2001) has termed the “crisis of white masculinity.” As Imms (2003) has stated, “Art education does own a legacy of neglecting boys” (p. 55). Applying Addison (2005), this article considers art and design in the formation of sexual identities. A focus on the life and work of Seton, with an analysis of his semi-autobiographical writing, provides select historical insight into gendered approaches to art education as well as romantic approaches to Native American art and education.

Art Education Policy in Canada.

(1996). Art Education Policy in Canada. Arts Education Policy Review: Vol. 97, No. 6, pp. 15-22.

South Kensington and the Colonies: David Blair of New Zealand and Canada.

Since the “discovery” of Walter Smith, American art educators quite naturally assume that Smith was the most important or only graduate of the South Kensington System to influence the development of art education in this continent. In fact Smith was only one of a number of South Kensingtonians who carried the system to the far corners of the English-speaking world, particularly to the colonies that were to become Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, as well as to Canada. This paper examines the career of one such art educator: David Phillip Blair (1850–1925). Just as Smith was influential in three countries (England, the United States, and Canada), Blair, who was born in Scotland, was active in England, New Zealand, and Canada.