International Journal of Early Years Education

Vol. 19, No. 1, March 2011, 45
53

The phenomenon of child creativity

Vladimir T. Kudryavtsev*

L.S. Vygotsky Institute of Psychology, Russian State University for the Humanities, Moscow,
Russia
(Received 2 June 2010; accepted 7 March 2011)

Children’s creativity is different from the creativity shown by adults. Discovery

for others, which is what adults do, results in technological, scientific or artistic
advances that then become part of the general culture. Discovery for oneself is
more subjective, and results in a change in the person rather than in the culture.
Although adults are capable of such subjective creativity, for the most part it
is evident in children, and plays an important part in their development. In this
article, the links between creativity and the features of cultural objects are
explained. Cultural objects exist at two levels. The first level
the external level

consists of the objectively observable features of the cultural object. The second
level
the internal level
consists of the hidden aspects of the object,
the logic and thought that has gone into the object’s creation. This internal level
constitutes the cultural meaning of the object, and some cultural objects have
multiple levels of meaning. Children (particularly preschool children) learn
these cultural meanings through their contact with cultural objects, which has to
be mediated by adults. This is where it is important that adults engage young
children’s creativity, because they need adult help to reconstruct the cultural
meanings inherent in cultural objects. It is important that helping adults involve
children in authentic communication around cultural objects, as this transforma-
tion of the self is an essential part of children’s cultural development. Teaching
children methods for problem solving runs the risk of depriving them of the
opportunity for creative thinking. Examples of formal and informal education are
provided that illustrate these principles.
Keywords: creativity; imagination; cultural tools; preschool age

The benchmark that I personally keep working towards is to forever remain a child.
Childhood is a phase of creative work par excellence!
Jean Piaget

You do not have to be a professional psychologist to determine the main

difference between children’s creative work and the creative work of adults. The
creative work of adults tends to bring novelty, originality and significance to the
entire society or its individual groups. Children’s creative work rarely possesses
these characteristics. Children do not invent linguistic and moral standards, scientific
concepts and work techniques
they do not create anything new, generally speaking.
All the collectively produced cultural heritage is already available when a child is

*Email: vtkud@mail.ru

ISSN 0966-9760 print/ISSN 1469-8463 online

– 2011 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/09669760.2011.570999
http://www.informaworld.com
46 V.T. Kudryavtsev

born and is ‘new’ only for a child. However, children can master everything that has
been created by mankind by the effort and work of their own brains or imagination.
Children have to ‘rediscover’ things that have already been adopted and reproduce
essential features of the creative activity that has produced the entire cultural system.
In this article, I shall discuss the essential aspects of culture that children need to
rediscover.
According to V.T. Kudryavtsev, in the psychology of creativity, it is essential to
distinguish between creative work as discovery for others and as discovery for
oneself. In the first case, creativity brings civilisation new technical inventions,
artworks and scientific discoveries. In the second case, it is the subjective, and not
the objective novelty of creative work that is important. Psychologists usually look at
creative work in the light of this subjective novelty. A birth into this world means for
a child a continuous chain of ‘discoveries for oneself’. It starts from the child’s birth
and not from the time that a child starts solving tasks that we adults call ‘creative’.
Brušlinskij (2003) gives a simple but revealing example of such ‘discovery for
oneself’. A five-year-old boy who was good with numbers and figures up to 20,
could not learn to read the clock, despite numerous explanations by adults. It really
troubled him. When, in the presence of strangers, his mother asked him to go to the
room where the clock hung and check the time, he would come back and whisper in
her ear what the position of the hour hand and minute hand was. The mother had to
work out what the time was from this information. But one day, when the child was
lying in bed, almost asleep, it dawned on him that twenty minutes to nine meant that
twenty minutes were left before it was nine o’clock, while nine twenty meant that
twenty minutes had passed after nine o’clock, etc. He suddenly ‘caught’ the entire
idea and called out to his mother to confirm it in case it was not true. This child
created nothing new, but his independent thinking led him to an understanding of
how time is displayed on clocks. This was an extraordinary discovery for this child
but it was a discovery only for the self, as the rest of the adult culture understands
very well how time is displayed. It is not unusual for children to discover things for
themselves. For instance Krutetsky, a specialist in the study of school children’s
mathematical capabilities, tells a story of a schoolboy in his sixth grade who, for
some reason, missed one year of school education and then independently
‘rediscovered’ a year’s course of geometry.
These discoveries for the self may well have value for mankind in general.
Thanks to these discoveries, a reproduction of creative abilities takes place at every
level of society. A discovery for oneself is a social and psychological pre-condition
of discoveries for others. Most adults are busy with routine and non-creative work
and rarely make such discoveries. Childhood is almost the only part of a person’s life
where creative work is a universal and natural way of existence and where mastering
an elementary way of handling a cultural object occurs in the child as a discovery for
oneself. The rediscovery of cultural objects that have been fixed in culture by
standards and canons says more about the creative potential of the discoverer than
the adult search for abstract novelty and original solutions. The child’s appropriation
of culture is a creative process in itself rather than a reproduction of cultural wealth
according to a particular pattern (Kudryavtsev 1997).
Cultural objects embody the powers of their creators, their potential, concepts
and perspective. Any piece of human culture and any cultural object will have hidden
features and can be perceived on more than one level. The first level is external,
 International Journal of Early Years Education 47

visible, tangible and through this children get in touch with the second level
the
internal aspect, the invisible, ideal content of culture.
Words, for instance, have an audible sound or visible form (when written) as their
first level and an abstract meaning as their second level. Children need to become
aware that a word does not correspond to the object that it defines, that it is an
abstraction of the object. If children do not develop an ability for such abstraction by
the age of six, they will confuse words and objects while solving abstract tasks, even
though they may find it easy to distinguish the things in everyday life. When asked:
‘which word is longer?’, such children might answer: ‘the word pencil is longer
than pencil-stub because a pencil-stub is a short pencil’; ‘the word whale is bigger
than tiger’; ‘the word moon is bigger than half-moon’ and so on (Bugrimenko
1994). An abstraction aptitude is necessary for children to separate words from their
meaning. Children also need this abstraction ability to use the second level of word
features as symbolic tools for determining their attitudes towards objects.
In the creations of human hands and brains, the power of the creation process
is present but not visible
it exists at the second level. For example, the logic of
the engineer’s thought is crystallised in the design of a car. However, lively and
unique the flow of this thought is
the only thing that finally gives sense and
integrity to a heap of metal
the original thought needs to be specially reconstru-
cted if the design is to be understood. This reconstruction can never be exhaustive
and comprehensive. That is why meanings that are transferred through objects
(by people who invent them) will always be a potential source of self-enrichment
and development for those who try to master these things, due to the creativity of
the interpreter. These invisible transferred meanings at the second level contain a
code for interpreting the text of human culture. The world of culture appears before
a child as a system of open problems to be solved, but not as a system of algorithms
to be reproduced. Culture is not something that can be reproduced, it is rather an
open realm of meanings that ask for creative reconstruction. The integration of
children into the social and cultural human world involves the search for a key to
solve these problems. A child only searches for this key with the help of adults.
Adults often feel the temptation to give this key directly to children, ready-to-use
rather than helping them to reconstruct cultural meanings. At first glance, this
simplifies the life of both adults and children and guarantees reliable ‘socialisation’.
But at what price?
Let us recall the classic phenomena of Piaget. In the presence of a five- or six-
year-old child, the same quantity of water is poured into two bottles
a wide and low
bottle and a long and narrow bottle. A child is then asked: which is the bottle that has
more water in it? He answers with confidence that it is the long and narrow bottle.
Then the adult asks again: how is this possible, when the same quantity of water has
been poured into both bottles. The child is not able to explain this paradox. The
experiments of Piaget can be reproduced in various other forms, such as shaping
the same quantity of clay into a ball and into a sausage shape, or making the same
piece of rope into a bunch or fully unwinding it, etc. The results will be similar.
According to Piaget, preschool children do not distinguish between the changing
shape and the unchanged, invariable quantity, owing to the egocentric limits of their
intellect. But is this interpretation correct?
Gal’perin (1936) and his colleagues have a solution for different interpretation:
children were taught to use measures, bottles used as units, rulers and similar acts of
measuring with the use of units. The result was that the ‘Phenomena of Piaget’
48 V.T. Kudryavtsev

disappeared. Children started to test their sense impressions against ‘measuring

tubes’, and the illusions of variable quantity disappeared. The Piagetian problem
of conservation of quantity disappeared, but it did not contribute to children’s
intellectual development either (Kurganov 1989). Children were still puzzled by the
fact that quantity and shape did not match, and yet they were offered a ready tool
to use, a measure. This is reminiscent of traditional school education where adults
give answers before children even have time to ask their questions. It cannot be
said that children of this age have no idea at all about measures. In a situation where
there are different bottles, children select the water level as a way to measure, even
if this is wrong. Without an independent understanding of the limitations of this
way of evaluating liquid quantity, children form non-critical attitudes to human tools
and their application. But in real life such problematic applications often, require a
creative approach and the construction of solutions. Teaching children methods for
problem solving runs the risk of depriving them of the opportunity for creative
thinking.
An illustration of a problem-oriented approach to measurement can be found in
the work of Sultanova (2007), who suggested a creative measurement of quantity and
understanding number concepts, in lessons aimed at the development of elementary
mathematical concepts in preschool children. In her approach, children are told the
following fairy tale:

Once upon a time there was a wizard who was very greedy. He really liked
numbers, especially number three and so he decided to steal it. (The teacher shows
three balls, each representing one part of number ‘three’.)
The wizard took his magic wand, touched the first part of number ‘three’ and
turned it into water. (The teacher takes one of the three balls, touches it with a
pointer, quickly hides it and shows a glass of water in its place.)
He did the same thing with the other two parts of number ‘three’ (The teacher
performs similar actions.)

 How many glasses does the wizard have now?

 Three,
children answer.

Then he took a bottle and poured all three glasses in it. He put the bottle top on
tightly.
The wizard came home. ‘Now the number ‘‘three’’ will always be mine’, he
said gleefully.
At home he found some glasses (the teacher takes three big glasses).
‘How many glasses does the wizard have?’
‘Three’ the children answer.

Then he decided to turn the water back into the number ‘three’. He poured
the water from the bottle into the first glass and blew over it. The water evaporated
 International Journal of Early Years Education 49

(the teacher pours out the water and puts a ball in the empty glass) and a number
‘one’ (the first part of number ‘three’) appeared. He poured water from the bottle into
the second glass, blew over it again and the second part of number ‘three’ appeared.
But there was no water left for the third glass. (The teacher turns the bottle upside
down to show that it is empty.)

‘Why did this happen?!’,
the wizard was puzzled,
‘I remember exactly that
I have stolen number ‘‘three’’ and have put the bottle top on tightly; but now I only
have a number ‘‘two’’’.

‘Children, what do you think has happened?’

‘The glasses that he used were too big.’
‘If the problem is to do with the glasses, let’s find some other glasses.’

The wizard poured all the water in to the bottle again. He put the top on tightly
and found some other glasses. (Now the teacher takes some small glasses and repeats
all the actions that he/she performed before. Now in order to use up all the water, six
glasses are needed.)
‘Has my bottle grown? Or should I blame it on the glasses again?! First it was
number ‘‘three’’, then it was number ‘‘two’’, but now it is number ‘‘six’’’.

‘Children, why did this happen?’

‘The glasses have become smaller.’
‘Let’s compare all the glasses.’

‘It turns out that not even a wizard is able to steal a number. A number is
something very magical. It can hide itself and then re-appear again!’

By way of this story, children are introduced to the cultural meaning of number

i.e. the meaning that exists at the second, invisible, level. They can access this level
because the story invokes their creative abilities. As a result of the combination of
children’s and the adult’s imagination children’s imagination is activated which
helps them to avoid the traps of egocentricity (as in the Piagetian phenomena) and
50 V.T. Kudryavtsev

it also helps them overcome them with the fairy tale character (the wizard).
Imagination helps the children to understand in their own way the idea that quantity
is invariable despite the changing shape. They do not just learn to apply a measure;
they learn to use it flexibly and selectively, and to consider changing contexts of
application. This is the difference between learning a solution that is to be
mechanically applied or learning to solve problems creatively and in so doing
producing a variety of solutions for a range of measuring tasks. Cultural meanings are
firmly attached to objects such as measures. These are the things that get used in
everyday life. People also create objects without clear utilitarian functions
objects
designed for nothing in particular and everything in general, for example artworks,
ceremonial and ritual objects. These bear an unlimited variety of human meanings and
are open to creative interpretation by any person or child who uses them.
However, when mastering a spoon, hammer, pen or scissors, children do not just
master the individual operations materialised in them but, in general, learn to deal
with these cultural objects in a human way. That is why mastering these items is not
just an elementary and routine study. It requires active orientation and searching
from a child who also has to overcome external and internal obstacles and solve
problems; and it assumes the creation of new functional systems within a child’s
psyche, an internal change.
As an example, let us look at the way a little child learns to use a spoon
one
of the first cultural tools that it has to deal with (although a spoon is not the simplest
tool to use). A spoon is not a ‘double-level’ but a ‘multi-level’ object. Ilyenkov
(2007) mentioned that a child’s mastery of a spoon reveals the entire contradictory
drama of development of the human psyche. He even wrote an (unpublished)
manuscript called ‘Poem about a spoon’. However, the process had been analysed
much earlier by Gal’perin (1936). His description is reproduced below with added
comments:

It is well-known, that children face considerable difficulties when trying to learn to use
a spoon. It turns out to be quite a challenge which often takes a long time to overcome.
At first, children will try to grab a spoon close to its bowl. They put their fingers into
the bowl in an effort to keep the operating part of the spoon as close to their fist as
possible. (According to Meshcheryakov, blind or deaf children try to get their faces into
the plate seeing no practical reason for using a mediator tool at all, not even the hands.)
Mothers usually try to make their children hold the spoon by the handle and scoop food
together. What then usually happens, is that the child lifts the spoon to the mouth with a
jerky movement and with the spoon at an angle, at which point most of the food falls off
the spoon. The action is as if the child was putting fist to mouth. A spoon is just an
extension of the child’s hand; and the spoon has a better chance of getting into the
mouth if the bowl is closer to the hand.

The social ‘tool logic’ of a spoon requires it to be always in a horizontal position

and to be vertically lifted, first, to the mouth level and only then, to be guided
straight in to the throat. However, the logic that is evident to an adult is not quite as
evident to a child because the spoon in the child’s hand is not yet a tool
it is
a substitution for the hand. Children see no problem in coordinating their manual
actions with tools but they have a tendency to adapt the spoon to the available
capacities of their hands. We can refer this back to El’konin who said that babies try
to make the world comfortable and pleasant for themselves. It takes a long time for
children to learn to use a spoon in a grown up manner, as a tool rather than a
 International Journal of Early Years Education 51

substitute for a hand. By force of habit they still keep trying to take the spoon with
a fist below the upper wide end of the handle. Many older preschoolers, who seem
to have mastered the tool fully, complain about the inconvenience of the regular
‘adult’ technique of holding a spoon with fingers, with the palm facing upwards.
There is another nuance noted by Ilyenkov (2007) during the discussion of
work with blind and deaf children in a specialised establishment. The adult
actively guides the spoon in the child’s hand from the plate to the mouth but at
some point the child’s hand, previously obeying the adult’s will, starts to
demonstrate its own liveliness. It suddenly starts to resist the pressure from the
adult’s hand, as if rejecting guidance, and tries to follow the route (although still
with difficulty at this point) from the plate to the mouth independently. Although
unsuccessful in its attempts, spattering soup or porridge, the child tries to do it
independently. The pedagogical art is to feel this moment, not miss it under any
circumstances.
Even if children adopt tool-mediated actions from an early age, they may still
have problems mastering a spoon, and there is a particular reason for this. A spoon is
not just an item used when eating but it is also a materialisation in metal of the
ethical and aesthetic standards of civilised behaviour. This is the second, cultural,
level of meaning for a spoon. If children do not comprehend this social meaning of a
spoon, they will never learn to eat in an adult manner. Relatively complex ethical and
aesthetic behaviours are established later in the preschool years. This is one of the
issues. The pre-condition for their creation is the adoption of social methods for
dealing with cultural objects (e.g. spoons) in the early years. It is an endless circle of
problems from which the child, find solutions with adult assistance.
How is creativity related to this? I would say that children’s ability to adopt
culture and its samples in a form of problems, rather than as ready made answers,
demonstrates the child’s independence, initiative and creative ability. As the example
with the spoon shows, the best way to master a tool is to creatively invent one’s own
way of handling it by solving the cultural problem that it brings. The presence
of this ability in children used to be the reason to consider them personifications
of divine creativity that an adult creator should look up to. According to the
philosopher Francis Bacon (1620), we need to become more like children in order to
understand science. Echoing him, Florensky wrote that the secret of creativity lay in
retaining juvenility, and the secret of genius lay in retaining childhood for life. These
statements romanticise childhood. In any dispute over whether children or adults are
more creative, I consider the question itself to be mistaken. Children’s creativity has
an original feature which also helps us to understand the nature of creativity in
adults. The result of discovery for oneself is not the creation of a new object but
a change in a child, a creation of new ways of activity, knowledge and skills.
‘Discovery for oneself’ is, in many ways, ‘discovery of oneself’, this was noted by
Vygotsky who used to associate creative work with ‘the creation of new forms of
behaviour’. ‘. . . Each idea, each movement and experience is pursuit of creation of
new reality or a break through to something new’ (Vygotsky 1926, 246). But some
psychologists are constrained by the limitations of adult-centric thinking. The words
of a psychologist like Bruner are representative: ‘A school boy learning physics
is a physicist, and it is easier for him to learn physics behaving like a physicist than
doing something else’ (Bruner 1960, 14). The author consistently defends the
didactic principle of scientific approach. However, while claiming a scientific
approach in education, we sometimes forget that science itself is just material
52 V.T. Kudryavtsev

through which children master the universal ability to think. Adults are delighted
when they see their children paint, make music or make poems, but they may fail to
see the children’s thinking as imagination and as a creative act as well. The latter is
much more difficult to achieve. There is no wonder that adults see early creative
specialisation as a sign of a special gift that deserves pedagogical respect. The
children identified as gifted are often the ones who become the objects of adult-
centric thinking.
Our national education, which has been mistakenly described as narrowly
pragmatic, used to take care of the development of children’s constructive skills in
the form of spiritual growth. In traditional cultures, children learned to use common
objects from an early age and were also involved in their production with adults. This
created feelings of involvement in the wonder of creation of something new and
important, made by the joint efforts of adults and children. Psychologists are now
well aware that it is joint activity and sharing of emotions between children and
adults that starts the key mechanism of children’s psychological development (Lisina
1985). ‘Making something together’ is more than producing a new object or idea

it is also gaining a general sense of what has already been done and what will be
done in the future. But this is quite a special task (one could say, a ‘meta-task’). At
the initial stages of personhood development, the important thing is not what a child
and adult do but that they do it and do it together. This was how El’konin (1989)
described it in his ‘Scientific diaries’.

The discovery of general meaning in joint actions leads to creation of a new image of
oneself and new possibilities for oneself, as a pre-condition of endlessly diverse creative
achievements in various areas of life.

In traditional cultures all children are involved from an early age in the creation
of artistic items crafted by adults. As a result, in adulthood, each of them show
quite a high level of creative achievements irrespective of their social group. I have
come across this issue recently while working on the decorative art of Ob-Ugor
people (Khanty and Mansi) and its pedagogical functions (see Kudryavtsev and
Rešetnikova 2003). In this culture craftswomen make traditional decorative patterns
on clothes while living in nearly pre-industrial conditions of remote and harsh
tundra forests or deer camps. The work is never done using a template. Decorative
patterns help to turn an item of practical use into a unique creation and work of art.
In these patterns, the authors display aspects of the World Map which play a
significant role in this community. Rendering this or that traditional story in
decorative works, through which this pattern is transferred, the craftswomen always
make it in a new way. We did not find any repetition in the entire assortment of items
that we examined. For the women themselves, this work is not considered to be a
forced and monotonous job
it is a ‘solemn performance’. This is clear from the
interviews with the craftswomen, who proved to be perfect story-tellers. It is an
original form of creative self-realisation that is experienced deeply inside a person.
It is not a coincidence that one of the Khanty goddesses appears as a woman with
a needle or that a needle box is considered a sacred object for the Khanty
(Kudryavtsev and Rešetnikova 2003).
What gives creative work the status of ‘a universal form of psychic activity’
(Poddiakov 1977) and ‘mechanism of development’ (Ponomarëv 1976)? This status
is determined by the very psychological basis of creative work that was identified by
 International Journal of Early Years Education 53

Vygotskij in human imagination, that is, by building an image of a possible (but yet
unavailable) result (Vygotskij 1991).

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