Mind

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.

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.

During the century XVII, in the European Enlightenment, the search and application of new mathematical methods to describe the world and the universe, changed not only our perception of nature but also the perception of the human being and his capacities. The *calculus* appears as a mathematical method to describe physical activity. In an age full of ambiguities and contradictions, divine power and creation dissipate in human hands.

In 1924, Sidney L. Pressey, professor of psychology at Ohio State University, developed what is considered by many to be the first teaching machine. In practice it was a box with typed questions, with 4 multiple choice numbered answers. The box allowed the "test" model that added the correct answers, or the "teach" model that did not allow to advance until the answer was correct.

The study of the creative mind and ways of measuring and increasing creativity emerged as the right mixture of nature and science by the times of post-World War II. The child became a focus for psychological investment in creativity. What was in question, particularly in the United States, was promoting the open-minded citizen in opposition to the authoritarian one. At the same time, creativity became a commodity presented to educators and parents as absolutely necessary.

This book puts together and edits essays and materials from different sources in order to bring to western academics the views of the mind that were present in Vygostky’s works that because of historical and political reasons (including the cold war) were relatively unknown and untranslated in the west until the 1960s.

The Macy conferences were a series of interdisciplinary scientific meetings held in New York between 1941 and 1960. Interdisciplinarity was in itself one of the major objectives of conferences that brought together scientists from different areas to break down disciplinary boundaries. Medicine would occupy an important place, not only because of the sponsor dedicated to health, Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation, as well as the isolation felt as a discipline in the face of the need to relate to areas such as, for example, nuclear physics or society (p. vii).