The Production of Creativity. The politics of Ferenc Mérei’s psychological and educational approach

Horváth, Zsolt K. (2018) The Production of Creativity. The politics of Ferenc Mérei’s psychological and educational approach. In: Creativity Exercises. Sternberg Press, Berlin - Leipzig. (Submitted)

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Abstract

In Europe between the two world wars, educational psychology, social psychology and child psychology (Édouard Claparède, Jean Piaget, Henri Wallon, Kurt Lewin and others) argued that intellectual abilities are not self-contained, hereditary, measurable faculties, but qualities that can be developed in childhood, above all in the educational system. It was a movement that was propagated in Hungary by László Nagy and Ferenc Mérei. In the 1960s, however, there was a resurgence of scientific insistence on what was put forward as objective measurement of intelligence had another. Neither viewpoint is free of the authors’ political and intellectual disposition. While left-wing psychologists, believing in social equality and social justice, put the emphasis on development and the quality of education, conservative and right-wing liberal authors focused on the inherited nature of intelligence, which allegedly obviated the need for any equalizing function in education. 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 his research, Mérei discovered four ways of qualitatively determining intelligence. Two of these concern intelligence as a whole, and define the intelligence constellation partly in terms of breadth, speed or depth and partly in terms of the predominance of understanding, ingenuity or criticism. The third distinction derives from the study of mode of perception, and distinguishes visual, auditory and motor disposition. Finally, by a fourth means of differentiation, we may talk about logical, verbal, numerical or general intelligences in terms of mode of expression.

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