I Hopes and Fears

You can read here about the seminar.

The paper intends to introduce the research project CREAT_ED: The Historicization of the Creative Child in Education, focusing on its online archive platform. While the project is still in development, its online archive platform already allows us to problematize how a particular theoretical framework cannot be separated from the methodological and ‘practical’ problems and answers concerning the research tools we need in the project.

This workshop intends to work through some selected sources of what we call ‘the archive of the creative child’. This archive is mainly constituted by published materials in Europe and the United States, from the end of the 18th century to the Post Second World War.

This is a workshop in which we will introduce the Project The Historicization of the Creative Child in Education. We will focus on the archive that is being constructed and strategies to work with and against this archive. We will mobilize archival materialities and work through some questions with the participants: How was the creative child constructed within western arts educational discourses at the intersection of discourses on race, class, gender, and ableism? Which subject positions are being mobilized? What are the colonialities we can name and deconstruct?

G. Stanley Hall was one of the leading figures in the North American Child Study Movement. In this book, the questions of arts education and imagination are central to the child's education. Here we will focus on the dangers deposited in the child with an excessive imagination. 

Cyril Burt was an English psychologist working on tests and intelligence. In this book, imagination as a classification that makes up a certain kind of child is explored. Referring to the results from Binet-Simon tests, he traces a psychological profile of a boy said to be 'taciturn.'

"The words sound wrong, somehow, like 'baking ices', 'polishing mud' or 'sliced lemonade'. This was the way Roger Fry started the text on Teaching Art. 'Art Teachers' seemed to sound also wrong, and yet, he vented, large amounts of money were being spent in 'breeding' the type. "What has been overlooked is the fact that Art cannot, properly speaking, be taught at all". The canons, the conventions, and historical facts could be taught, but "one cannot teach a thing which does not exist". The text argues against the possibility of teaching the intuitive powers of creation.