There is a tendency, in literature, to ascribe the popularity of the concept of creativity to the influence of psychological research. In this paper, I will argue that this does not suffice to account for the near-universal acclaim of the term, nor for the way it has come to embody so many different, and often contradictory, meanings. Creativity has to be understood as a concept that arose as a result of concrete historical circumstances. In the period of the 1920s-1950s, just before the stimulation of personal creativity became a widely accepted educational goal, different practices and theories were formed in response to one of the central problems in education: how to balance the fostering of individual talent with the needs of the community. The political evolution of the interwar period made this question especially pressing. Through the example of arts education in Europe from the 1920s on, I will show how educators tried to position themselves with regard to this problem, and how this led to noticeable tensions between different educational philosophies. After the war, these tensions and contradictions were seemingly resolved by the adoption of the concept of creativity, which was facilitated by the reference to psychological research.