The Production of Creativity. The Politics of Ferenc Mérei's Psychological and Educational Approach

Horváth, Zsolt K. (2019) The Production of Creativity. The Politics of Ferenc Mérei's Psychological and Educational Approach. In: Creativity Exercises. Emancipatory Pedagogies in Art and Beyond. Sternberg Press – Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst – Tranzit, Berlin – Leipzig – Budapest, pp. 343-353. (In Press)

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Abstract

Ferenc Mérei’s early career was thus fundamentally shaped by French sociology and educational theory. It is in this spirit that he discussed the world of the child and early development in his writing between 1934 and 1942. In one of his lesser-known earlier papers, he put forward his scientific counter-arguments concerning the “child prodigy” phenomenon.15 For a child extolled by the family as a “prodigy”, the most important task of psychology and education is to provide protection against later disappointments, because the child will usually be unable to live up to what are in any case false expectations. Mérei recommended a much more subtle approach to measuring intelligence, based on multiple criteria: he attacked Alfred Binet’s concept of intelligence and outlined an innovation by the neurologist Grigory Rossolimo by which intelligence was regarded as something more than a quantitatively definable stock and could also be examined qualitatively. This approach distinguished among abilities and produced a graph of test results which he called the psychological profile, although the score was less significant than the shape or figure of the curve.

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