When we now think of the notion of children and childhood, almost immediately the idea of creativity emerges as natural to this period of life. However, the idea of the creative child is a fabrication that emerges especially in the Post-War II period and which is related to the hope of a better world associated with an open, flexible, democratic and creative personality (Cohen-Cole, 2009; Ogata, 2013). The risks and fears of the atrocities of World War II, and the idea of competition among nations, led to an investment in these notions. However, even though the boom of creativity takes place after the Second World War, it feeds on earlier formulations of a romanticized childhood centered around ideas of purity, naivety, innocence, spontaneity, and imagination (Martins, in press; Nelson, 2014). Historically, drawing has been closely connected to notions of imaginations and creativity. The activity of drawing entered schools under slogans of free expression, living from the aura of the artistic, but also worked as an instrument to collect raw material on the child. Thus, drawing worked as a diagnostic tool, through which developmental stages could be ‘seen’, and as a regulatory instrument through which the normal child was measured and compared in relation to other children from different places, races and ages. It was also intended to perceive how the child thought, how its aptitudes evolved and as a projection of his or her cognitive development (Martins, 2017). At stake was the governmentalization of the field of childhood. Even if the naïve play-activity of the child was perceived as close to the artistic ethos, and vice versa, there was a certain skepticism visible when talking about the act of creation as the inauguration of something totally new during childhood. Not that imagination was diabolized in childhood, but there would be a complex path to go in the way of looking at the child until the second half of the 20th century, when imagination, now under the name of creativity, would be commodified and transformed into a way of being a person. The paper will focus on the way the child was fabricated, since the second half of the 19th century as potentially imaginative and, one century ahead, as naturally creative.

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