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

The idea that children possess natural creative abilities is not contemporary; its roots extend back at least several hundred years, when thinkers such as Locke and Rousseau theorized the child as a blank slate uniquely in tune with nature. Later, children’s imaginative energies would be developed materially and discursively, such as in the theories of kindergarten founder Friedrich Fröbel, which then found concrete form in the educational toys marketed by Milton Bradley in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. However, creativity as a culturally specific construction, and the ends to which it has been put, have remained largely unexamined topics. Much like the notion of childhood innocence, an historically contingent concept often taken as a natural alliance, creativity is generally understood as a quality inherent to children. As such, the figure of the creative child has proven a powerful image for marketers, educators, politicians, and parents alike.

In Designing the Creative Child: Playthings and Places in Midcentury America, Amy F. Ogata presents a complex survey of the toys, environments, educational theories, and narratives that sustained the notion of childhood creativity in the decades following the Second World War, demonstrating its transformation into a national asset during this time, particularly as a foil to Soviet conformity. Drawing upon examples from across high and low culture, Ogata considers how the creative American child was “constituted visually, materially, spatially, and scientifically” (xvi) during the postwar era, including “how the educational rhetoric of creativity was commodified” (xix) at this time.

Each chapter is situated within a broader historical trajectory, connecting the work of historical educational theorists to the specificity of the postwar context. In chapter one, “Constructing Creativity in Postwar America,” Ogata explores scientific studies, picture books, TV shows, and new suburban community spaces such as shopping malls as they variously constructed new emphasis in children’s creativity after WWII. Advice literature such as Benjamin Spock’s Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care and studies undertaken by Yale psychologist Arnold Gessell prioritized children’s individual personalities, placing new responsibility on parents to foster inventiveness as a developmental and social quality. While Soviet children were perceived to exercise minimal creative latitude, the inventive capacity of U.S. children came to be understood as a distinctly American value awaiting development and deployment.

Ogata notes increased usage of creativity as a term in the postwar decades, its breadth becoming a catchall for the promise and potential of American children. For example, a statement from the Midcentury White House Conference on Children and Youth, assured children, “We will help you develop initiative and imagination, so that you may have the opportunity freely to create” (20). Creativity was thus made productive; even its open-endedness was nevertheless calculated to prepare children to contribute to a free, dynamic, democratic society in direct opposition to the conformity associated not only with communism, but with certain domestic demographic shifts as well.

Foregrounding the child’s ingenuity and originality also dislodged the image of the postwar suburb as a place of homogeneity, allaying a core tension between the individual and the collective evidenced in studies such as a 1958 report by the Foundation for Research on Human Behaviors called “Creativity and Conformity.” Children were uniquely caught between the desire to conform (assimilation) and to exercise individual expression. Picture books like H. A. Rey’s Curious George, Crockett Johnson’s Harold and the Purple Crayon, and Ezra Jack Keats’ The Snowy Day celebrated the child’s ability to construct imaginary worlds, and children’s television offered new models of interactivity. For example, the CBS program Winky Dink and You, broadcast in the 1950s, invited children to purchase a transparent overlay that would permit them to draw along on the screen as prompted by the show’s host Jack Barry and the eponymous animated character. However, even as popular narratives, advice literature, and expert studies valued creativity, Ogata skillfully demonstrates how its cultivation as an individual quality was...