Creativity

In this article, Thomas Munro (curator of Education for the Cleveland Museum of Art from 1931-67) seeks to reflect on the possibilities of education in museums in the face of a new idea of childhood. The child Munro talks about is a curious, creative child who should not be subjected to tedious educational practices, capable of destroying her childlike nature. Munro considers that if it is necessary to think about how to make the child love a museum, then something needs to be fixed with art museums, not with the child.

In a 1937 publication titled The Museum Educates, The Toledo Museum of Art claimed to have been the first in the world to be child-centered. The creative child, who is spontaneous, naive, and curious (the several layers of colonialities in the reactivation of a primitivist view of the child) was said to be not only the most appreciated educational target, but the easiest too.

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.

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.

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 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?

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.

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 work is marked by an underlying concern with individuals being productive in their creativity, in understanding, observing and measuring the abilities linked to creative performance, and to productive forms of creativity (e.g. invention and technological innovation, solutions to social problems).