Creativity and playfulness seem to be “natural” classifications to think and talk about what childhood is about and what a child is and should be. The making of this articulation goes back, at least, to the end of the 17th century. Names such as John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Johann Pestalozzi, Friedrich Froebel, Maria Montessori, and John Dewey circulated internationally and were assimilated at local levels as "indigenous foreigners" and "traveling libraries" ( Popkewitz, 2000), contributing to the Western notion of the child and childhood as a time of play and imagination. It means that knowledge about the child traveled and formed grids that ordered the scientific rationality of childhood and adapted and transformed it in each place to give rise to local specificities. The chapter will not contextualize different positioning about what the creative child “is” in the post–World War Two years or how that notion developed throughout history. Rather, the focus is on the conditions of possibility for considering the child as naturally creative kind of person.
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