Imagination

During the 16th and 17th centuries, imagination was conceptualized as being a female characteristic and one that could be monstrous: “monstrous progeny resulted from the disorder of maternal imagination” (Huet, 1993, p. 1). The origins of monsters erased the male paternity at the same time that it stressed the dangerous power of female imagination. When, in the 18th century, the powers of imagination and creation started to be associated with the child, it was not still clear the gender of the child. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in Emile, conceives imagination as dangerous for both Emile and Sophie. During the 19th century it becomes essentialized that children are imaginative and, progressively, in the educational realm, differentiations are produced about the good and the bad ways of imagining. The French pedagogue Gabriel Compayré, for example, defined imagination as synonymous with invention, but he immediately warned his readers that imagination was both the most useful and the most pernicious, the most brilliant but the most disastrous faculty of the spirit, for being the master of errors and falsehoods. Imagination, he wrote, “it is free fantasy which no longer restricts itself to slavishly copying reality. For the novelty of the forms that it imposes on the elements it uses, on the materials that it gathers from all sides, it has the appearance of a creative power, and it is called creative imagination” (Compayré, 1882, p. 1005).

1884 - Outlines of Psychology (James Sully)

Submitted by csmartins on Mon, 12/23/2019 - 10:33

The different ways in which imagination was spoken of in the educational field were shrouded in ambiguities. Sometimes welcomed and desired, sometimes feared for the troubles it might cause to the production of the child as a future citizen. The discourse unfolded, identifying nuances in these ambiguities and anxieties, above all through the lines drawn between good and evil imaginations. The imaginative child as a kind of person was already a reality, with more than one way to be lived.

1916 - Child Art (Katherine Ball)

Submitted by csmartins on Thu, 12/12/2019 - 07:39

Katherine Ball was the Director of art in public schools in San Francisco. In this article, the naturalization of the child as an artist is evidenced, but not a given. The value of arts education was not to produce artists but rather "to give a training designed to develop the faculties of observation, imagination and graphic expression".

We highlight some of the passages in the text:

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