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187 e P i l O g u e t h e l e g a C y O F C O n s u m i n g C r e a t i v i t y C R E A T I v I T Y , I n T H E P o S T W A R I M A G I n A T I o n , implied individual thought and action, and was widely considered a fundamentally human and democratic quality. If, as many suggested, childhood creativity was an untapped natural resource, then it could be cultivated, harvested, and consumed , making the creative child both a sentimental and a strategic figure. The project of the creative child was, and still is, the dream and the work of adults.1 As a group of educational psychologists observed in 1967, “We are all potentially creative, but only those who have become creative realize it. One of the best ways to cultivate our own creativity is to help children cultivate theirs.”2 Parents, then, desired creativity for their children and for themselves. Creativity was embedded in an ambitious postwar, middle-class ideal of raising exceptional children, but it also played a broader and more nationalistic role in attempting to ensure competitiveness. At an ideological level, creativity provided a foil for the preoccupations of the age. Positioned against the critique of social conformity, creativity stood for an admirable individuality. In contrast to rote learning, it embodied pleasure and curiosity . In the face of rising political tensions and fears of weakness, creativity was a useful myth of revitalized and endless national ingenuity. I have argued that material goods participated actively in the dissemination and consumption of creativity at a quotidian level. The construction toys, playrooms, classrooms, stacking school furniture, and working experiments at the Brooklyn Children’s Museum and the Exploratorium each in their own way contributed to the growth and cultural acceptance of childhood creativity. While psychological research advanced the social acceptance of these things, their own material properties animated the discourse and, through manipulation, realized the figure of the creative child. The six slots in stiff cardboard rectangles or alnico magnets created play possibili- EPIloGuE 188 ties from industrial materials; lightweight plywood or polypropylene seats made school furniture reasonably easy to move; open plans made possible the idea of dedicated play areas even in small houses; and a long stream of cool water in a dark tunnel enticed touch. Undoubtedly, of course, postwar children devised other, darker schemes for their toys. Children played without playrooms, teachers did not transform their classrooms into living rooms for learning, and both children and adults may well have found even the most open museums stifling. Nonetheless, the design of these objects and spaces, and other forms of the proliferating material culture of postwar childhood, engendered in the idea of childhood creativity a strongly sensory engagement. These object lessons redefined the cultural mythology around creativity away from an elite concern of the interwar years to a fully consumable and aspirational notion that has not yet abated. The cultural myth of creativity has roots in the discourses around individuality and invention that flourished in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and has been continually reenvisioned to suit our needs. Exceptionalist notions of American culture devised well before the postwar era persist, especially around the idea of innovation and inventiveness, which are often synonyms for creativity. In business, in education, and in playthings , the rhetoric of creativity is ubiquitous. It promotes a vast range of goods and services for children and adults, corporate self-image, pedagogical theory, and individual output. The pervasiveness of the creativity discourse suggests that we remain heavily invested in its promises. As an advertisement for Mega Bloks (2006) suggests, creativity—in the form of children’s construction toys—will grow up and “save the world” (Figure E.1). The importance of play in stimulating children’s creativity and imagination is still a central theme for research psychologists, educators, and designers . The belief that children no longer have the time to play because of academic preschools and kindergartens, a screen culture of video games, an epidemic of childhood obesity, and a fear that children do not have the same freedom that earlier generations experienced has informed efforts to create opportunities for free play in schools and communities. A push to build “creative playgrounds,” such as the Rockwell Group’s Imagination Playground at Burling Slip (2010), in Lower Manhattan, is under way, although...

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