The economy of it is that clip art is cheap (really, free) and plentiful. Of course, so is high fructose corn syrup.

As you and I have talked about before, there’s some benefit in a child learning to generalize from real things to drawings of things (e.g., a line drawing of a house is still recognized as a house), but I think we’re both at the same conclusion that this is more of an eventual end than a means to good learning at this point.

Of course, you really have to start with real pictures regardless at this stage of learning, and they obviously make a huge difference around here vs. the cheap cards you can get at the store.