Vocabulary

The archive is not a neutral place. It is made up of materials that were chosen to be preserved. The materials presented here are part of the archive of the creative child. This archive comprises materials mainly produced in Europe and North America from the end of the eighteenth century to the Post-World War II. The creative child is fabricated within these discursive formations. This archive is part of the colonialities of arts education. The archive defines the limits and the (im)possibilities of what can be said. Working with and against the materials of this archive is embedded in the contradiction of these (im)possibilities.

At the turn of the 19th century, the graphic productions of children started to be looked at as 'art' by modern educators and artists. The category was made possible through the equivalences between the child and the so-called 'primitive' and the child and the artist. The Othering of the child as the Othering of the non-European was an exoticizing gesture of the modernity/coloniality matrix of power (Quijano). Children's drawings started to be collected and put side by side with the works of modern white male artists, such as Picasso, Klee, Kokoschka, Matisse, Dubuffet, etc. Within arts education discourses, the term child art, which is generally attributed to Franz Cizek, appears connected to the principle of free expression.

The notion that children 'develop' is a modern notion through an idea of time towards a future. This temporality takes development and progress (of children, of humanity, and the nation; see [[recapitulation theory]]) as inevitable. The modern conceptualization of history as past, present, and future was based on an arrow of time, in which the past represented the less developed and the future represented the further developed. The new sciences of education that emerged during the 19th century took this evolutionist rationale to think about the child. Development was one of the technologies used to construct the 'white', male child as natural and universal. Developmentalism is thus the rationale that separates the child from the adult based on binary oppositions such as nature/civilization. The child, as close to [[nature]], and thus to 'origin', made the senses (see [[education of the senses]]) and their taming as the raw material of education. Modern progressive arts education was based on this notion that, again, separated the child (as nature) from the adult (as reasoning).

With the emergence of the educational sciences and psychology, children and their graphic marks were used to produce knowledge about the child. Children's drawings emerged as empirical objects to be studied by psychologists and educators. Collecting drawings made by children became a practice that was aligned with the new statistical way of reasoning that allowed for the demarcation of a normal childhood and its ‘Others’.

Coloniality is the epistemic violence that constructs subjectivities (coloniality of being) and knowledge (coloniality of knowledge). We use the concept of coloniality, borrowing it from Anibal Quijano. Coloniality is not the same as colonialism, but a continuation, through the colonialization of the mind and knowledge of its power structures. When we talk about the colonialities that structure arts education discursive practices, we are referring to, for instance: the hegemonic ways through which the child continues to be addressed as a developmental being (learns from the senses, from the simple to the complex, to achieve reason - the adult state as a citizen of the 'nation'); the notion that the child is naturally creative (as is imagined as closer to nature, and thus, to a 'primitive' state); the ways through which, in drawing, for example, the child is said to develop through stages of development (whose rationality is the same of the nineteenth-century recapitulationist rationale); the ways through which 'art' and 'education' continue to enact a paternalism in terms of assuming what is good for the 'Others' (being these 'Others' the child, but also all those that are represented by the power structures as in need to be 'civilized'). Part of the coloniality of arts education practices is also the unquestioned notion of the developmental and creative child as natural and universal. This is the 'white' child that had/has the white, male, European, middle-class, heterosexual, non-disabled adult as a model.

Creativity is seen as part of the child's nature, becoming a matter of potential to be actualized or not through education. CREAT_ED seeks to historically understand how an idea of the child as a creative being became an almost unquestionable spot in education. Creativity had to emerge as a problem and anxiety in education to become an educational goal. The making of the creative child is accompanied by the hope of a better future and the fear of the citizen that does not fit within the category.

The senses have been of great concern in education. Thereby the determination of five senses as well as the division of the senses as associated with the body and rational judgement associated with the mind are produced by [[colonialities]]. Sensuous experience was deemed of a 'lower' kind from which rational, abstract thinking could be developed. As such, the training of the senses as part of governing the child is entangled with [[child development]] and the [[recapitulation theory]]. The turn towards sensorial learning through the contact and interaction with the material world has led to a proliferation of materialities, for example toys and games, within arts education and education at large.

We look to the creative child as an event. If we do not take the creative child as natural, instead as a fabrication, then inseparable from this way of understanding this fabrication of a certain kind of people (Hacking) is this making as an ‘event’. In this project, the idea of the creative child as a natural occurrence, or creativity as an essence that is natural to childhood, is considered to be ‘eventful’. This ‘eventualizing’ of the child as creative is to ask about it as an effect of historical practices and power relations, to access the multiple lines that compose what we today conceive as the creative child, its rules of formation and enunciations. Some of its meanings are lost through time, some are changed, contradictions and specificities coexist, and all of them are part of the ways of reasoning about the creative child as history in the present. Considering the creative child as an event presupposes that we treat discourse in its materiality and irruption. Discourse is not being used as a descriptor of reality but as a producer of that reality. As such, the creative child as an 'event' is made up of several layers that become invisible in the present, making this present possible.

Michel Foucault (1980) talked about an ontology of the present or a history of the present to understand the subjects we have become. Thomas Popkewitz talks about historicizing instead of historicism. Historicization proposes a decentring of the subject as a way “to engage the complex intersections that produce principles that govern what is thought, talked about, seen, and felt in the making of the subject” (Popkewitz, 2013, p. 15). This is how we conceive of the [[creative child]] as an [[event]] that must be historicized. We do not look at history as a linear development through the arrow of time. This is why a history of the present is interested in finding the genealogies that make the present possible. It implies a particular relation to the [[archive]].

One of the most central and persistent legacies of [[coloniality]] as conceptualized by Anibal Quijano is the nature/culture binary. Opposing the civilised, white, european, male subject (culture) to the objectified, [['primitive']], sensous 'Other' (nature) became the core of arguments promoting discrimination such as racist, sexist and classist oppression. Nature, furthermore, has been a powerful metaphor or tool to render historically formed sets of norms and normative practices seemingly 'natural', obscuring their historical and social making. Within education, the nature of the child and the knowledges produced about this subject position have been crucial to the narratives of [[child development]] and [[recapitualtion theory]].

In its earlier educational formulations, play was naturalized as proper of childhood and talked as the path to learning. Within this essentialization of play, there are moral and governmental goals. Not only would play remove the child from vicious or risky entertainment, but it would also train the child to become a civilized citizen of the nation. The organization of play and its spaces were also configured as devices for observing and producing knowledge about the child. It is essential to acknowledge that the playful child is made up at the intersection of racial, gender, ableist, adultist, and class markers.

When we use ‘primitive’, we should use 'primitive' between commas. This means that the 'primitive' is a construction that differentiates between different kinds of humans through a rationale based on a sense of history as past, present, and future, where those that were so-called 'primitive' were situated as the past of humanity and, thus, as less developed. The term was used, in Western modernity, to classify those that were not European and not 'white'. It is a racist and colonial term that was also mobilized in education and the arts, particularly in the equivalence of the 'child as primitive' and the 'primitive as child'. This equivalence was made possible through certain affinities created as evidence between the visual production of children and those depicted in the colonies as 'primitive'. It is also part of the binary system 'primitive or savage' and civilized.

The idea of a creative or imaginative child, emerging at the turn of the 18th to the 19th century, when reason became the sovereign value, cannot be disconnected from a conception of the mind anchored in that same value. Reason exists in [[nature]] and the mind must seek it, approach it and be it. Reason in the Enlightenment occupies the place of the divine. Cults and parties are erected in its honor, it is a goddess! Being outside the body and having the mind as its articulator, whatever the idea of reason being constructed, it relativizes the body when not excluding it. The cartesian mind-body dualism is not a separation, however, its distinction operated in social fragmentation. The study of the mind begins mainly with upper-middle-class children. The child's mind, its study and investigation is the key to the adult's mind, to understanding and governing it. That is, the child's mind has not become just an object of study, it is above all a construction of how that mind should evolve, from its [['primitive']] state to the adult state. However, the focus on the upper-middle-class child's mind makes clear the bodies that can 'evolve' and the adult that this child should be. The child's mind as a project of that adult and respective [[colonialities]] will also be found, in different dimensions, after the 2nd World War. However, the conception of mind becomes involved in a new paradigm, the mind as computer. If at the time of the Enlightenment, unlike the body, the mind could not be seen as a machine and the laws of physics would not serve to study it, in the post-war period, the mind becomes comparable to a machine. Paradoxically, through the dematerialization of the machine in Alan Turing's formula in which a computer is software, the mind also becomes subject to the laws of physics in what would become the fundamental framework in the study of cybernetics. The Enlightenment's project of reason reaches the form of a program in the 20th century — mind, science and [[nature]] are in harmony in that program.

One of the images of the child that prevailed since the end of the 18th century was that of children's innocence. Rousseau imagined the child as innocent, pure, and close to nature, however, threatened by the evils of civilization. The innocent status of children participated in maintaining them in a not-yet space, under the gaze and the directives of the adult. In progressive arts education practices, the innocent children's nature was seen in need of protection, as this was the child who was naturally spontaneous and free from rules. Looking to the different constructions of children as innocent, one can observe that these are connected to moral, gender, racial, and class issues. The innocent child created its 'Others': the racialized child, the poor child, the deviant child, the liar child, etc.

Recapitulation theory is the hypothesis that emerged during the 19th century based on the belief that the development of the embryo of an animal, from fertilization to gestation or hatching (ontogeny), goes through stages resembling or representing successive adult stages in the evolution of the animal's remote ancestors (phylogeny). It was also applied in education to refer to the [[child development]]. This notion fed the equivalence of the child as [[primitive]]. Drawing was one of the terrains in which the theory was used, and evidence was fabricated based on visual affinities through [[stages of development]].

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).

We use Sara Ahmed's concept of straightening devices. She talks about the will as a technique, "a way of holding a subject to account". The concept is interesting to think about how children's imagination was kept within certain borders. The children chewing the borders of a 'right' way of imagining were those willful subjects that child art as a straightening device, or the multiple ways through which imagination was configured within the educational discourse, tried to hold to account. We can read those willful subjects as queer subjects. As studied by Eve Sedgwick, the word queer derives from the Indo-European word 'twerkw', meaning to turn or to twist, thus, a deviation from the straight orientation. The concept is particularly useful for our line 'the hopes and fears of creativity in education'. The new modern notion of history as past, present, and future and the recapitulation theory gave rise to the notion of child development. This way of producing knowledge about the child was essential to the government of children. The separation of the child from the adult and the invention of steps through which the child's growth should pass created a set of expectations that defined what a normal child was and should be and, simultaneously, what the abnormal child was. We refer to the stages of development as straightening devices, using Sara Ahmed's concept.

Arts education discourse is full of metaphors coming from the botanical world (Martins, in press). We have been interested in understanding how these metaphors (the child as a seed or as a plant) have moral and political implications in terms of the government of children. But not only: these metaphors start from a developmental approach in terms of conceiving the child (see: [[stages of development]]). The educator as a gardener has the task of conducting the 'right' development of the child, as a botanical tutor to plants. The idea of growth was precisely first applied to plants, progressively being applied also to animals and the human person. The idea of development, on the other hand, has a more recent use, but since the end of the eighteenth century, it has been associated with a gradual process of unfolding and an advance through progressive stages. As Kathryn Stockton puts it, the idea of growth presupposes verticality, the idea of development presupposes linearity. The child grows not only in stature but according to a linear behaviour. The willful child would be the one that queerized the idea of a 'natural' gradual and linear development. Developmental theories of the child seek to nullify the child who ‘grows sideways’ and in different directions.

Whiteness refers to the construction of the 'white' race and the structural privileges afforded by 'white' people. Race as a social categorization is based on the production of racial differences on the body level such as – yet not limited to – skin colour and functions strongly on a social level. Hence, whiteness as a category of race refers to value and belief systems as well as habits and attitudes that are allocated in 'white' bodies. The particularity of whiteness within the social categorization of race is that it constitutes itself as the unmarked norm. In the book Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992), Toni Morrison discusses how literature is neither universal nor race-free. She asks, “How is ‘literary whiteness’ made, and what is the consequence of that construction?”. Once one starts to perceive that whiteness is there structuring the imagination of literature, then “it requires hard work not to see this”. Morrison continues: “It is as if I had been looking at a fishbowl – the glide and flick of the golden scales, the green tip, the bolt of white careening back from the gills; the castles at the bottom, surrounded by peebles and tiny, intricate fronds of green; the barely disturbed water, the flecks of waste and food, the tranquil bubbles traveling to the surface – and suddenly I saw the bowl, the structure that transparently (and invisibly) permits the ordered life it contains to exist in the larger world.” Another definition of whiteness by Reni Eddo-Lodge (2017, Why am I no longer talking to white people about race): “Neutral is white. The default is white. Because we are born into an already written script that tells us what to expect from strangers due to their skin colour, accents and social status, the whole humanity is coded as white. Blackness, however, is considered the ‘other’ and therefore to be suspected. Those who are coded as a threat in our collective representation of humanity are not white.”

Self-government was a topic of modern progressive education. We borrow the meanings of the concept from Michel Foucault's theory of governmentality. The government of the self was part of the ways in which power was conceived in modern Western nations. Power was dependent on the knowledge of the subjects to be governed, and their souls. Governmentality as the conduct of the conduct is the best expression to understand the politics of one's own government. It promotes a relation of the subject with themselves, in such a way that the care of the self and the conduct of the self become inseparable. In his text Technologies of the Self, Foucault explains that these are those "which permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality." As such, the practices or technologies of self-government show us how power and knowledge were conceived not in opposition, but entangled, with the sense of autonomy, freedom, choice and self-improvement.

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).

We approach the concept of "savage thought" from Ginger Nolan, in her analysis of how structuralism dismantled 'racial difference' by demonstrating that human cognitive structures are common to all humans. She also notes that white culture was practically not the subject of anthropology before the end of the 20th century. XX. Based on the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss, in particular, "The Savage Mind", Ginger notes Lévi-Strauss' strategy to refute the very term [['primitive']] and the respective notion as an inaptitude for theoretical and abstract thinking . This strategy involved distinguishing between the concepts of "bricolage" and "engineering", aligning engineering with western technoscience and bricolage with "science we prefer to call 'prior' rather than 'primitve'." Ginger, highlights the cybernetic plane where Levi-Strauss moves, in which this techno-scientific laboratory establishes the bricoleur also as a matter of experience, often as a racialized figure. Despite not establishing explicit hierarchical and racial relations, for Lévi-Strauss, bricolage appears as the first universal cognitive structure. Therefore, the bricoleur can be framed in a laboratory in which the engineer occupies a privileged and sovereign position. The laboratory is the place where depoliticization, technologies of government and new forms of economic organization are developed. Thus, in the impossibility of biological-racial distinction, the developed techniques maintain the structure of racialization, establishing the distinction between bricoleurs, allegedly unaware of their way of thinking, and engineers, systems designers and great beneficiaries of these same systems. Savage thought is a form of "governing by design", which depoliticizes the negotiation of difference, maintaining the racialization structures of those who design the system on those who, supposedly, cannot think and politicize it.

We use exoticism to refer to the act of gazing and classifying the 'Other' as unusual, and thus, exciting for the Western mind. Exoticism played an important role in modern arts and literature, picturing the 'Other' as 'exotic', closer to nature, and 'authentic'. The act of exoticizing is an objectifying practice, which reduces those that are the subjects of that practice to 'curiosities'. At the same time, such as with the concept of the 'primitive', the invention of the 'exotic' was for the construction of a Western self. This term can also be related to Edward Said's concept of 'Orientalism', as the web of discourses produced by the Occident about the Orient. Said wrote: "Taking the late eighteenth century as a very roughly defined starting point Orientalism can be discussed and analyzed as the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient—dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient” (Edward Said, 1978 Orientalism).