Designing the Creative Child: Playthings and Places in Midcentury America by Amy F. Ogata (review)

In this welcome and refreshing contribution to the recent history of American efforts to shape the child, design historian Amy Ogata shows how the idea of the natural creativity of children was integrated into a wide range of educational, commercial, and childrearing initiatives in the generation after World War II.

Ogata focuses on the shift from the biological and behaviorist childrearing ideas of Holt and Watson for the attentive, but tolerant and indirect, parenting methods advocated by Gesell, Spock, and Mead. She takes this familiar story further by stressing the impact of a group of psychologists who argued for the teachability of creativity in children through art, less didactic children’s literature (replacing Dick and Jane with Curious George or Maurice Sendak’s Max), and early imaginative TV programming (Winky Dink and You, for example, that culminated in Sesame Street in 1969). Despite concerns over consumerist conformity in this period, Ogata notes how much of this rhetoric of creativity was expressed through consumer choice, especially in a vast industry of “creative” playthings manufactured by Playskool, Holgate, and Creative Playthings. These companies sold open-ended educational toys after consulting with child development experts like Edith Kawin and modernist designers like Charles and Ray Eames. The creative playground movement abandoned the traditional swings and slides for “adventure” sites that offered children safe explorations of modernist forms and textures, hoping to educate children’s taste.

Following the growing interest in the history of children’s space, Ogata offers an intriguing chapter on avant-garde housing designs of the period, which provided environments for children’s self-expression (for example, playrooms near the kitchen for supervision, but that featured vivid colors and simple, portable modernist furnishings, erasable wall surfaces, and little ornament to encourage individuality). Though designed for wealthy progressive parents, many of these ideas trickled down to the middle class in do-it-yourself magazines and books. Along similar lines, she explores how the school building boom of the 1950s and 60s substituted the multistory monumental schools of the past with their long halls and rows of iron-and-wood desks for one-story pavilion-type structures that offered children flexible classrooms (often with folding walls and moveable furniture, some arranged in circular spaces). Some, like the Educational Facilities Laboratories, went further in the 1960s and 1970s with large spaces partitioned with folding panels allowing flexible individualized and mixed-grade-level learning.

Finally, Otaga explores how the discourse of creativity impacted art and science education, showing especially how art became part of the standard curriculum in the postwar with the claim that nondirected art projects promoted creativity, emotional expression, and self-confidence in students. And manufacturers of art supplies like Binney & Smith adopted the language of creativity to promote sales with a staff of artists and educators, even promoting its crayons as “the quiet toy” in the late 1960s. She reviews the origins of junior museums (featuring children’s art), “hands-on” children’s museums, and unique sites like physicist Frank Oppenheimer’s innovative Exploratorium of San Francisco in 1969 that combined play and science.

Otaga concludes her homage to the creative child movement by recognizing that many boomer kids never had playrooms or teachers who made their classrooms into “living rooms for learning,” but she insists that the creativity movement lives on in contemporary psychological research, concern about the decline of American innovativeness in the globalized economy, the persistence of imaginative playthings (at least in boutique stores), and the continuing success of children’s museums and unique museums like the Strong in Rochester, New York, devoted to creative play. Even in a commercialized form, this rhetoric continues to define middle-class parental aspirations for their children.

As important as was the creative child movement, in Otaga’s effort to tell a positive story, she may overestimate its influence even in the boomer middle class, especially beyond New York and the affluent suburb from which she...