Life classes show children what real bodies look like

WANT to look like one of the popsies on Love Island? Spend several thousand pounds on cosmetic procedures promoted in the ad breaks and you’re in with a chance for the next series.

No wonder teenage girls are beset with anxiety about their looks.

One answer, according to a former president of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters, is life drawing in schools.

By life drawing, let there be no confusion, he means drawing naked people. The nude in art – male and female – is as old as Adam and Eve. The problem is that sniggering-at-the-back-ofthe-class Brits have always had a puerile attitude to nudity. Combine that with the moral panic at anything which might seem to tend towards sexualising children and you can see that not everyone would agree that life classes should be on the menu.

Yet at my school (in the dim and distant) for two hours a week, those who did art seriously did a life class. The models, old and young, fat and thin, black and white, male and female, disrobed in the cupboard where we kept the brushes and water jars and emerged in their dressing gowns.

Removing their robes they positioned themselves for our scrutiny. The men wore tiny garments which were, it is true, objects of silent fascination to adolescent girls. There was a two-bar electric fire so the models didn’t get cold. What did we learn? We learned to draw and we learned anatomy. And we learned respect and reverence for the human body in all its variations. Anyone who smirked initially pretty soon unsmirked.

We neither chattered nor wasted time because in drawing a real human being you engage in an unspoken relationship with that person. You owe it to them to do your best.

Art in schools is a victim of education cuts. Core academic subjects matter but there must be a balance. Let’s not lose art classes and let’s give older children life classes.

If only to prove that reality is far more beautiful than anything on Love Island.