Eras would have differed in the balance of how much time children had to themselves, devoted to companionship with their peers, and spent under the supervision of adults and in what they did in all those different kinds of time. Accepting these gaps in our knowledge, it can be productive for art educators to speculate about how it might have felt for children actually to have spent time on the various past methods of instruction. If we read the history of art education with the child's mind and body in our mind, and with awareness of the changes it will undergo, we develop an empathic appreciation of what it would have been like to be a learner of each of the many historical approaches. This attitude will produce better historical thinking. The empathy demanded of the reader would force him or her to wonder about the space within classrooms, the furniture, how people were dressed, the homes to which the children returned, and the attitudes of friends, siblings, and parents.
History becomes more alive and useful to classroom practice.
In our time, we now are no longer in the grips of that double-speak in which teachers claimed to be only cultivating, and not instructing, the child. We no longer need confound the methods and purposes of teaching and research. Now we can openly express our interest in instruction. Because of this, we are at an ideal moment to match the legacy of past methods with that more recent inheritance, developmental psychology. As we read the various art education methods of the past, though there are only rare references in the 1850s to drawing as play, we know we should consider how drawing might have provided a form of play for children of the nineteenth century.