This article investigates childhood from an allegorical perspective, through a work carried out in the context of the discipline of Art with children in the 5th grade of a municipal school, located in the periphery of the city of Pelotas. The work searched for similarities between Medieval Art and Contemporary Art, exploring a new language for artistic expression: interference in an everyday object, which takes on another function. Art! The support object for the proposal was a shoebox. This work also promoted a refl ection with (and through) the children, on the trivialization of appearance, and the search of standards in something external, as suggestions for referencing choices. In an attempt to summarize this work, we propose a reading through an approach to the concept of childhood as critic of culture, a “Pandora Childhood”, in which the boxes produced by the children revel not only our problems, but perhaps also our hopes.