The book is based on the three years of an initiative called 'RE-IMAGINING SCHOOLS', which we did at the Sadhana Village School near Pune, from 2011 July till 2014 August.  The drawings that children did in these three years were very telling of the connection between what they experience, what they play, and what they draw. We had created an environment of freedom so as to enable children to act as per their wishes. This enabled them to spend a lot of time drawing. There was no guidance in any manner, shape, or form, due to which their drawings were a result of their own experience.

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  The book covers the context of the experiment, a detailed study of the drawings done by children with about 350 drawings, a chapter on how we organized space so as to create conditions for children to draw spontaneously, a chapter on what had prevented us from recognizing the real importance of drawing along with a re-assessment of the importance given to writing as well as how the notion of art as 'self-expression' has misled us, the role of drawing in history, the possibilities for further research and a concluding chapter which summarizes the findings. 

 

 The content is organized under 15 main chapters and the chapter on drawing by children with 17 sub-sections covering various aspects from observation to cognition.

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  The main theme is about how drawing which children do, naturally helps children to understand the real world as well as why in the context of literacy, drawing should be given more importance than writing, especially up to the age of 10 or so.

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  Cognition or understanding of the world cannot happen without engaging with it. Children engage in observation, exploration, and manipulation of their world. In short, the world needs to be experienced. So children reinforce what they have experienced through their play – various aspects of the experience several times, in several ways where they constantly innovate, imagine, create, explore form, explore properties and processes. The importance is given to learning to write, and the denial of opportunity and time for spontaneous play, has completely changed the cognitive paradigm. With the word replacing the world as the cognitive source a total change took place in all aspects of our lives.

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  The schooling process places the written word as the cognitive source and learning the word is the very essence of schooling.

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  The importance of drawing is not explored well due to two reasons.  Firstly, writing being given over-importance even though it is not a cognitive tool, and secondly, by keeping drawing as part of so-called 'art'.

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  In the evolution of writing, drawing preceded writing. In a way, it may be that drawing led to the development of writing.  Writing is given more importance than drawing maybe because drawing is being considered an artistic skill. Children do drawing naturally whereas writing skills have to be taught in the context of literate communities. Children, if they are left alone would draw things that are connected with their experience. And this needs to be encouraged, as their observation and reflection would be kept alive. Schooling obliterates this observational ability and also places writing at a much superior plane. Writing in real life also needs observation. However, as what we write in schools is out of our context and experience, we hardly connect the content of writing with observation.