Ableism is a system that discriminates against disabled people. When we refer to the creative child as a non-disabled child, it means that, discursively, the creative child was imagined as non-disabled. Ableist metaphors, adjectivations, and analogies were used to describe the too-imaginative child. For instance, the child with an 'unbalanced '[[imagination]] was close to certain mental illnesses, such as madness, and condemned to unhappiness. This child was characterized as having a diseased imagination. As such, when talking about an unbalanced imagination, the ableist metaphors convey prejudices about people with disabilities or even summon ableist fantasies, which accentuate the binary between reason and ignorance or romanticize it (as is the case of the positive connotations between the ‘true’ nature of genius with madness).
The book from Wilhelm Viola is about the art education methods of the Austrian Franz Cizek. It starts with the history of ‘child art’ as being the history of the discovery of the child “as a human being with his own personality and his own particular laws”, and the importance of Cizek in perceiving the child’s nature.
