Creativity

The text problematizes the making of the student as a creative and entrepreneurial subject in contemporary times. It argues that creativity is being instrumentalized as a technology of government. In a way, it takes governmentality as a way to analyze how this fabrication of a human kind is inscribed in older technologies for the government of the subject since modernity, particularly through the reactivation of a pastoral and confessional power.

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?

This article from Louise Maitland is based on comparing the western child with the ‘primitive’. The illustrations in the article are “traced copies of the original drawings”. Maitland affirms what, by the end of the 19th century, became a common argument among western ‘white’ educators, psychologists, and art educators: “On comparing the drawings of primitive races with those of children, we find that they possess many points of interest in common.

The Visual Games are a collection of materials made up of books, games, book-games, worksheets, modules and equipment, aimed at the visual education of children and young people. They were conceived by the painter Elvira Leite and the architect Manuela Malpique, both arts teachers in Portuguese public education.

B. F. Skinner was already a well known psychologist - and by that time controversial for defending a stricly behavioristic position - when he produced the address On the Future of Art: “Creating the Creative Artist” in the Guggenheim Museum in March 25 1969.

Bruno Munari’s concept of creativity encompassed ideas such as dexterity & acquaintance, experimentation & investigation, collectivity, relatedness and problem-solving. In his book Fantasia, the author expands the significance attributed to creativity, noting on how to stimulate creativity correctly, and simultaneously making clear how erroneous albeit usual some individual and educational habits are in terms of triggering creative practices.

Psychological tests of creativity, like IQ tests, allowed for the ranking of different kinds of people (Cohen-Cole, 2009). Guilford discussed the need to construct tests to measure individuals' creative abilities, considering other creative individuals. He was not alone. This comparative way of reasoning about individuals was making the creative person and crystalizing its characteristics through certain kinds of expected behaviors that produced differences among different people. Creative people, for instance, were more likely to enjoy modern art, particularly abstract expressionism.

The paper, published in 1958 in Art Education after an address prepared for presentation to the Pacific Arts Association, is set against a discourse of crisis, a crisis in (western, american, urban) societies that is derived from an expansion of technological solutions and their presence in everyday life. That crisis is intensified by automation, gadgets and specialized services, and produces the alienation of people from many everyday challenges and “the joy of mastery over problems” (Guilford, 1958, p. 4).

This book was submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and Literature at the University of Chicago by the candidate Lilla Estelle Appleton to obtain the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. As the title makes evident, the study is made through the equivalence of the child with the ‘savage’, simultaneously making those so-called ‘adult savages’ comparable to the child.