In this article from 1936, author Marion Richardson begins by discussing how teachers have changed their approach to teaching drawing--from teaching students to draw still life and copy from objects to allowing children to use their own technique. She explains, "We have changed our methods, partly because we no longer think of art as man's effort to imitate the appearance of the natural world but rather man's effort to express his realization of an underlying harmony, and also because we have discovered that children have their own individual approach to art, and the beginnings of a technique of their own which are inseparable from their way of seeing and experiencing things." She goes on to say that as the child grows older, the teacher should help him to "distinguish rightly and to develop his own art unimpaired." She further states that "a good teacher knows how to direct and inspire without imposing his own personality or his own style of painting on his pupils. The majority of teachers, being non-specialists, have no style of their own to impose. ... These non-specialist teachers are doing fine work and are discovering through modern methods that their own interest in the subject is reborn." She concludes that "there is no certain way of understanding painting other than by trying to paint sincerely. In light of their own struggles with the artist's problem the boys and girls begin to understand pictures. ... They begin to be able to choose between the real and the sham because their own work, to themselves unmistakably sincere or otherwise, is giving them the touchstone." Finally she asks if this touchstone will help these students understand other forms of art and explains that there are already signs that it will. [This essay was reprinted from the London County Council's Annual Report, 1936, Vol. V, Education.]