ACADEMIA Letters The Hopes and Fears of the Creative Child in Education: the Circlusion of/by a Problem Catarina Martins, i2ADS - Institute of Research in Art, Design and Society/ Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Porto The rhetoric of creativity is part of a project of happiness, and it presents as a self-fulflling as- piration and responsibility: each person is expected to achieve the promised land of successful creativity (Kalin, 2018; Martins, 2014, 2020b). The failure to be creative tends to be under- stood in terms of merit and efort, and as the result of an act of choice. As Andreas Reckwitz argues, one of the desires that defes comprehension in contemporary western society is the “desire not to be creative” (2017, p. 1). This paper is part of a bigger research project (https://creat-ed.i2ads.up.pt/) that intends to historicize what today became an almost unquestionable spot: the notion of the western child as naturally creative within education. Instead of asking what is the creative child, or how can we enhance children’s creativity, I ask how is that possible to think about children as being naturally creative and what does creativity does when seen as a characteristic that defnes the child? Historically, I identify some lines that reached the present in diferent ways and that are part of coloniality of arts education practices. These lines are: the equivalence of the child and the so-called ‘primitive’ and how the child was conceptualized within a space closer to a certain idea of nature; the gardening practices of arts education, in which several metaphors of the child as a plant or as a seed were developed and colonized the space of the child as a developing being; and the hopes and fears surrounding the imaginative child in education. It is in this last one that I will be focusing on this paper. Academia Letters, November 2021 Corresponding Author: Catarina Martins, catarina.martins.fbaup@gmail.com Citation: Martins, C. (2021). The Hopes and Fears of the Creative Child in Education: the Circlusion of/by a Problem. Academia Letters, Article 4147. 1 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0