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The Brooklyn Children’s Museum, the first children’s museum in the country, aimed its offerings at middle-class children who they saw as independent strivers. In discussing the types of science education available at their museum, the educators who ran the Brooklyn Children’s Museum showed how science education for boys in the early twentieth century was pitched at a higher level than the equivalent offerings for girls.

In the final chapter I discuss how creativity was instilled through postwar public art and science education. In the mid-twentieth century, “creative art” became the general name for all types of art education. I explore how school art instruction, art materials, and children’s museums created a widely disseminated image of childhood creativity.

This chapter presents an ethnographic mapping of the youngsters' journeys within and beyond the confines of the Brooklyn Children's Museum (BCM), placing West Indian immigrant youth within the racial and gender-based obstacles Black teens must traverse as they navigate New York City. Outings to a Barnes and Noble bookstore, a McDonald's restaurant, and a movie theater, along with the teens' uses of cellular phones, emerge as conflict-ridden sites. The chapter addresses the prominent role of consumer culture in shaping the lives of these urban dwellers and interprets the youths' extracurricular activities in and around BCM as spatializing forces that help to construct transnational racial and gender identities.

The New Children’s Museum is a museum in which each ‘exhibit’ is a conceptual work of art by a contemporary artist, commissioned by the museum as a springboard for playful experiences. Neither a children’s museum, where the focus is on learning through play, nor a standard contemporary art museum, The New Children’s Museum is a hybrid space that calls for new ways of doing research, requiring tools that can go beyond positivist and ethnographic approaches. This review assembles examples of alternative research methodologies, drawn from diverse practices such as performance studies and performance art, that may contribute to mapping the complexities presented by a children’s museum that also actively engages in the production of contemporary art. It includes some experiments with a/r/tography, and in conclusion offers a method assemblage that might be termed ‘ludo-artographic’.

Chapter three explores how the ideal of “creative living” affected all residents of the postwar house. In increasingly informal postwar houses the playroom occupied a strategic place. Toy-like furniture and playhouses were sold to encouraged children to develop their own fantasy world while reinforcing the role of the parent as the model of creative activity in the home.

This chapter begins with a description of the cathedral near the author's apartment in Cologne, which reminded her of the pyramids. Although erected thousands of years later, the cathedral, like the pyramids, is an amazing testament to the power of the faith. The cathedral and the Rhine, the museums, and the Philharmonic kept the author from becoming homesick. During her brief stay in Cologne, she had admired the educational programs for children the museums had developed to accompany their exhibition Nofret, the Beautiful. She then decided that she wanted to work in museum education programs, especially for children and the handicapped. From 1988 to 1991 the author worked on the study about an Egyptian children's museum, writing it first in Arabic, then in a German version.

Chapter two shows how the concept of play, imagination, and the educational toy market fortified the notion of childhood creativity. Manufacturers, designers, and even art museums created new toys that promised to instill creativity and worked to transform the playground.

Chapter 1 examines how demographic shifts toward young families, a rise in wages, and concerns about raising children grew intensely. Amidst debates on affluence and social conformity, psychologists devoted new energy to the study of creativity. The figure of the creative child was thus constituted scientifically, materially, and visually in postwar picture books and on television.

Population shifts, new housing, and the baby boom dictated the need for thousands of new schools. Dramatic changes in the school environment reflected new notions of teaching. Behind these changes lay the increasing acceptance of modern design as a means of helping children to learn in ways that might stimulate their attention and their imaginations.