Designing the Creative Child: Playthings and Places in Midcentury America

Abstract

Designing the Creative Child: Playthings and Places in Midcentury America Amy F. Ogata Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2013. Introduction, images, notes, bibliography, index. 229 pp. $34.95 cloth. ISBN: 9780816679614In Designing the Creative Child: Playthings and Places in Midcentury America, Amy F. Ogata shows how a cultural preoccupation with childhood creativity leftits mark on American material life. While the idea of the child as naturally creative first emerged in the eighteenth century and grew steadily during the nineteenth, it was only in the twentieth century that it took root across America. The belief that children were naturally creative, and that their creative sensibilities could be further nurtured and expanded by exposing them to stimulating environments and objects spread rapidly during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, particularly among middle- and upper-class Americans.Ogata explains that childhood creativity became a subject of pervasive concern because of social tensions related to America's Cold War with the Soviet Union. During that era, many social commentators investigated the effects of child rearing on political culture. For instance, anthropologist Margaret Mead suggested that Soviet children were trained to accept ideology without question, whereas American boys and girls had greater liberty of thought. Mead was not alone, and many experts believed that the key to winning the Cold War was to ensure that the rising generation was flexible, innovative, and open to exploration. The creative child also offered a comforting alternative to sociologist William Whyte's "Organization Man," the embodiment of conformity and conventional living. Child-rearing experts proposed that with proper training and encouragement, youth might develop into something other than the herd-like creatures of David Riesman's "lonely crowd." And, some hoped, creative children, who could find new ways to amuse themselves and who were trained to think independently, might be able to resist the seductive lure of American mass culture that played incessantly on their television screens.Ogata's book is well researched, well written, and beautifully illustrated-and truly innovative in its depiction of how a generation of toy designers, architects, and museum curators gave shape to their faith in youthful creativity. Whether it was the flexible, bendable Gumby, the simple and unadorned wooden toys of Playskool, the school designs of Saarinen and other midcentury architects, the playrooms and spaces enshrined in many newly built houses, or the children's art carnivals put on by the Museum of Modern Art, the goal of fostering youthful creativity was embodied in an array of objects, buildings, and installations that still exist today. Often we take for granted these designs, giving scant consideration to their pedagogical and psychological goals, yet undergirding them were larger hopes for the development of an intellectually agile and inventive citizenry. …