By Holly Seidenfeld 
A picture frame. A state project. A collage. Every parent of a preschooler smiles when their child comes home and is proud of the project that they created in school. But, not all projects are created equal.
When I look back at the projects I created in elementary school, they involved a lot of drawings on construction paper. There are a few more elaborate ones, like the flying monkey from The Wizard of Oz we had to sew in second grade. The common theme of all of them, though? They look like a child created them. The drawings involve stick figures, and the flying monkey is lined with uneven stitches.
Today, kids sometimes come home with projects that look immaculate. Every piece of foam is stickered in the exact spot it should be. The materials are sometimes advanced. I recently went to a resin event that seemed to challenge every woman in the room. Am I really supposed to believe third graders have managed to use resin to create something seamlessly?
The pluses of today’s projects are obvious: the art project that looks perfect is beautiful to use on your table. But the negatives are reflective of multiple issues that should be red flags in the actual education of your child
Kids in the process of learning should be challenged appropriately; a task shouldn’t be too easy that they’re not learning, nor too hard that they can’t complete it at all. Instead, they should be learning with some support from a teacher. (This is called the zone of proximal development in educational literature, an idea put forward by Leo Vygotsky.) If a project the student is creating is perfect, what does that tell us? It was either too easy that every child was able to do it perfectly (and therefore the student didn’t actually learn anything), or it was way too challenging (and an adult, likely feeling pressure that the project should be showcase-ready, stepped in to finish it).
Projects should encourage kids to learn something new, like a new artistic technique, but in a way that allows them to do it themselves with some support from their teacher. And what does this ultimately mean? The product won’t be perfect.
By only allowing perfect projects, we are telling our children we think products have to be perfect. One of the reasons I believe in art education at schools (an idea challenged by limited instructional time and budgetary cuts) is that art teaches kids about the process of failure. Ironically, one of education’s biggest failures is that kids are not taught to fail. We often praise the child who got the answer right the first time and give poor grades to the child who messed up. Art can be a medium in which we tell kids to erase and to remold, to revise and reflect on their previous work, and not to get discouraged by the initial output. This goal is undermined if we tell our children we only want perfection. How can we hope they learn the process of failure and pivoting if we say perfect is what we’re looking for?
Another goal of art is to allow a child’s creative mind to emerge. Would Pablo Picasso have been told by his elementary school teachers that his drawings didn’t make sense? Probably. I’m not suggesting we should allow Minecraft drawings to be on a child’s holiday project (something my son would undoubtedly choose), but I do think we need to be okay with letting our children test artistic boundaries and ideas. My other son recently brought home a woodshop box I was so impressed with, both by the process and the product. In addition to writing inspirational verses, he wrote on the side, “My dad loves Snapple.” Why? Unclear. But a window into his mind? Yes. I loved it.
Projects in school are important. They are one of the more memorable ways children will remember a unit or ideas they’re taught in school. (Think back on your education; my guess is many of you remember some of the projects you created in school.) But not all projects are created equal. The truth is, the less polished projects—the ones with crooked glue, uneven stitches, and a few surprising details —are the ones that actually mean your child is learning.
Originally published in Ami Magazine
by Lauren Eberspacher 
