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35 2 e D u C a t i O n a l t O y s a n D C r e a t i v e P l a y t h i n g s T H E H E I G H T E n E D F o C U S on children owing to the baby boom stimulated a national debate over child rearing and encouraged both sharp public interest in education and unprecedented spending on children. In addition to buying new parenting guides and magazines advocating techniques for raising a healthy, well-adjusted child, postwar parents spent record sums on amusements. In 1954, a trade organization estimated that the American toy industry brought in a billion and a quarter dollars annually, and during that Christmas season, families purchased an average of nine toys per household.1 These numbers increased some 67 percent in the 1960s alone.2 Toys such as building blocks, beads, wooden trains and cars, and Peg-Boards became standard equipment in the postwar playroom of the young middle -class child. Although seemingly innocent objects, many “educational” toys—toys intended to teach physical skills or develop cognitive abilities— were embedded in changing ideas about early learning, postwar discussions about national image, and new research on the origins and social significance of creativity. The major American educational-toy companies, such as Holgate, Playskool, and especially Creative Playthings, developed and promoted objects that reflected a growing faith in creativity as an authentic value that could encourage a competitive edge in midcentury America. Although a broad sector of the middle class adopted “good parenting ” as both a personal and national obligation and looked to playthings as a means of teaching their children, it was the upper middle classes that most readily embraced the notion that personal creativity could become a source of societal renewal.3 As a result, many “educational” toys achieved new recognition not only for their pedagogical qualities but also for their design and promises to stimulate invention and train taste. Toys have attracted the attention of scholars from many fields, but educational toys, EducAtIonAl toyS And crE AtIVE Pl Ay thInGS 36 particularly those of the postwar era, have not.4 In looking at the ways that the ideal of creativity permeated the educational-toy industry, I argue that what was accepted as a “natural” relationship between creativity and childhood was in fact consciously developed along with postwar discourses on psychology, education, and art. eduCaTIonal Toys Objects have probably always played a role in educating children, but the concept of an educational device or “toy” that instills specific lessons in children is only about three hundred years old.5 One of the most celebrated examples of a deliberately educational toy is the set of alphabet blocks that the English philosopher John Locke developed for teaching literacy in the late seventeenth century. Locke’s blocks show how teaching objects are historically linked to a specific set of educational ideas and an ambitious, emerging middle class that sought to train—through a solitary, indoor activity—the next generation to preserve or surpass the prevailing social standing of the family, society, or country.6 Although the concept of the educational toy has shifted over time to encompass a wide variety of objects, it has maintained these emphases on early learning as a form of social and societal improvement .7 Like the concept of the toy, notions of play, creativity, and childhood have been knit together as a modern construction. Creativity is embedded in historical and philosophical discussions of play and is closely linked with a belief in the positive effects of the human imagination.8 Because play is central to the concept of modern Western childhood, it has accumulated associations of imagination and invention. The nineteenth-century writer and art critic Charles Baudelaire observed, “In their games children give evidence of their great capacity for abstraction and their high imaginative power.”9 Since at least the eighteenth century, philosophers and writers have viewed play as liberating and constructive, for both children and adults.10 By the late 1930s, Johan Huizinga, in his influential study Homo Ludens (published in English in 1950), established that play had an important social and spiritual function in the production of art and culture. The French sociologist Roger Caillois, writing in 1958, argued not only that culture derived from play but also that specific aspects of play, especially games, constitute a central means of many kinds of human interaction.11...

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