The postwar european educational space is marked by a growing attention for concepts like “emotional well-being”, “self-expression” and “creativity.” These concepts can be seen as performative historical constructions that have had a profound influence on the educational space and the way pupils are disciplined. In this paper, the focus will be on creativity and the way this concept has been put to use in educational discourses as well as in the educational context of the classroom.

Of course, a concept like  creativity was not invented from scratch. It drew on already existing notions like creative genius, the creative imagination and the creative urge. Nevertheless, it was only after World War II that the noun “creativity” appeared in European educational discourses. In the postwar discourses on creativity, the concept is constructed as a generalized human capacity, operating across a wide range of different domains. In contrast to intelligence, seen as essentially unchangeable, creativity is constructed as a mental quality that can and should be improved through schooling. Creativity becomes one of the new challenges in educational reform.

There is a transformation, a change, that takes place after the second world war. It is within these changes that creativity, as a noun, is separated from creative imagination or other terms. This transformation takes place under the changing relations of power, knowledge and the body (Foucault, 1976).  In order to understand this properly, a genealogical approach is necessary. Both creativity and emotions seem to be part of the “inward turn” in pedagogical techniques, which accompany a shift from disciplinary techniques towards a control society (Foucault, Deleuze 1990). The goal, normalizing pupils into docile bodies, is still the same, but the way it is achieved is different. Instead of directly disciplining bodies, there is a shift toward indirect control. The focus of this presentation will be on how creativity, and to lesser extent emotionality, are used as a control mechanism in the everyday pedagogical practice, and how this forms a part of the grammar of schooling as proposed by Tyack and Cuban (1995) and Depaepe et al. (2000).

This will be illustrated with an analysis of the Belgian pedagogical journals ‘L’educateur Belge’, ‘Christene School’ and ‘Pedagogische Periodiek’, using issues from 1950 till 1980. These periodicals were published and edited by teachers’ unions, and they are comparable to journals in other European countries. As such, they occupy an important place in the space between theory and practice, and offer a good perspective for further research on how creativity was used within the European educational space. From this analysis it will become clear how the notion of creativity was used to control pupils without directly disciplining them.  Children are given “a certain freedom” to guide them towards the right path, to “force them to become themselves”, as it is put in one of these publications. Disciplinary techniques that inscribed themselves on the body are (slowly) being replaced by control mechanisms who aim at the “soul” (Rose, 1990; Popkewitz, 1998).

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